Nothing Is Obsolete

Blogging is a strange preoccupation that I undertook after discovering other people's blogs on the net. I've always been predisposed to sharing ideas and personal opinions. At it's worst, blogging offers an unblemished wall in which to reveal your inner jerk - at its best, a cyber soapbox from which you might positively inspire others.

A challenge as a catalyst for learning new things: 

I've been fascinated by computing since the age of six when I unwrapped a brand-new Texas Instruments microcomputer on Christmas day of 1983. At that tender age, I was already an avid reader, and pouring over the manuals of this wondrous device to discover the secrets of its inner workings won-out over sitting-down to a Scholastic paperback novel. Imagine my parents' astonishment upon seeing me execute a simple program I'd written in BASIC before I was even old enough to safely operate a lawn mower.

Needless to say, I never struggled with curriculum-based computer studies throughout elementary school. Still, there was always a looming sense of being left-behind in a world where the sheer rate of technological advancement was elusively stupefying. I knew that computers would always be present in my life, and many of my premonitions about what would be, have since manifested in reality. Obviously I wasn't the only preteen of the late eighties to envision first-person 3D platforms or MMOGs a full decade before DOOM hit the shelves (but believe me, I was ridiculed for suggesting such things), but dare I say that I might even have been one of the pioneering developers of such sophisticated programming had I not discovered my passion for playing the electric guitar in the late eighties. 

It was 1989 before I got my hands on a MODEM. At that time, a number of local Bulletin Board Systems

were available to the public where I lived. I remember those days vividly, and cannot help but chuckle when I think about how the kids of today would perceive my enthusiasm over things like dial-up telecommunications and ANSI graphics. Computers never dominated my time, however, and I recognized that far greater minds than my own were busy developing ever more complex systems and protocols. I knew it would take a full-time commitment if I ever expected to be on the leading-edge of software development, and of course, I had high school classes to worry about. It wasn't until the mid-nineties that I let-go my determination to become a star programmer, and became content with my above-average computer literacy level. 

Good enough for cataloging recipes.

The point of this article is to express to you, esteemed reader, that it's never too late to pick-up where you left-off. Even though it'd be considered a pile of legacy equipment and obsolete boat-anchor PC boxes by today's standards, my fourteen-year-old self would've pissed his pants with excitement upon seeing my thirty-seven-year-old's current set-up... in the same childhood bedroom no less! I'm in the midst of attempting to beef-up a legacy notebook computer without even a USB port. It has a floppy disk drive, a serial port, a parallel port, and a PCIA (network card) dock. I find it both pathetic and wonderful all at once.

Why am I doing all this? I don't really know exactly. It's a challenge. What I do know is that in pursuing this goal, I'm forced to learn all about networking, Linux, and IP routing. Whether it will ever pay-off or not probably depends on me, but as I overcome each new hurdle, my computing confidence grows. Last night, I managed to read the contents of the floppy disk from a drive I installed myself in an old PC that I'm using as a Linux server. Someone who works with such things on a routine basis would probably just scoff at my sense of accomplishment, but when I saw the contents of a 3.5" diskette appear on my Windows XP laptop after they'd routed through my home network, I felt like popping a cork! 

     

NARCOPETROL $$$ / HOUR - Soreness of the lower back as a factor of overtime calculations.

Sitting at the kitchen table with the folks this morning, I was touching on the subject of marketing - namely men's razors - i.e. the redundancy of multiple blades being contained in one safety razor. Mom brought-up the bagel slicer. If you haven't seen one, it's simply a wooden chock with a bagel-sized cavity and lateral slots to keep the cut of a bread knife more or less evenly and centered in relation to the bagel as you saw it into lobes. I think it might qualify to classify as a chuck or a chock or a jig or something in mill work woodworking terms.

"Who would ever need something like that?"

"Someone suffering from Parkinson's disease," I quickly replied. 

And I could have gone-on with a baker's dozen of other reasons someone might greatly benefit from such a potential breakfast changing culinary contrivance, but alas, it has become painfully obvious to me that some people aren't interested in having their shortsightedness exposed as I am. Not everyone is like me. 

Experience has taught me that it often proves so much easier to just bite my tongue and nod in agreement with unimportant, narrow-minded judgments than risk pointless headache inducing arguments by challenging someone who might just anxiously be awaiting any excuse to blow-up. Go ahead, shoot the messenger for pointing-out a few irrefutably practical alternatives to a weak proposal. Going along to get along... that's me!

I live in my own wee world of abstractions and wherewithal. I can rhetorically convince myself of the validity behind untruths as easily as I can reduce a perfectly sound empirical assertion into a set of unlikely and absurd components.

I don't know if that makes sense... it's like a way of decontextualizing widely held, common, yet unproven belief structures.  

The other day, a family friend was over having a beer. Although they didn't refrain from sharing their disapproval about my lengthy reprieve from the world of everyday wage work, I decided to keep silent in regard to my distaste for nearly half of the selections in their otherwise agreeable cross-section of their iTunes library. I usually make an effort to be sociable and entertaining, but I really had no advance notice they'd be there upon my return from a friend's place, and I was already intent on finishing-up a couple of media projects. The sort of pursuits that cause people to wonder where you find the time after they ask you to free-up your schedule for the next week. I'm sure the guest didn't feel shirked in the least... it's just rare that I'm not busy doing something or feeling a tad anti-social. 

Call it selfish, but my own determination to engage in artistic pursuits often wins out when I'm presented with a choice between free time or money. If I had a nickle for every perplexed look I've gotten over the years in response to an employer asking if I wouldn't mind staying late, I'd be out the door and on my way to find the nearest friendly neighbourhood booze-istan for a nine-shy-a-flat of discount peasant swill and a free t-shirt. 

Don't you want the overtime? What's a few more hours behind the wheel of a big noisy diesel truck anyway? Got plans or something?

There was a time in my life where I thought it was the coolest thing to get a slightly better than average wage for doing very little. These days, it's as if the very opposite is true. I would rather be paid nothing to demonstrate to myself I can achieve something meaningful, novel, or interesting, than act in capacity of a company rascal who is paid 'X' dollars and a half a point per hour, to achieve nothing more than what ultimately amounts to demonstrating your subservience to the dollar in exchange for a sore back if you're a simple unskilled labourer like myself. 

It really depends on the nature of the work and whether or not you enjoy being there enough. Some people are willing enough to endure a little extra tedium in their lives just to make the utility payment early or go on a vacation. I understand. Or hey, if you have a nice easy job and the good boss uncharacteristically finds themselves in a bind one day, what sort of jerky employee wouldn't make that occasional sacrifice for the benefit of the very person who not only throws you a party once a year, but makes your very job possible in the first place? Consider your wage as more of a salary if you like. Heck, I might even make that sacrifice for regular time if I happen to need a solid excuse to weasel out of a bad date! 

Anyway, my point is, is that if you're already a good employee, you shouldn't be afraid to tell your direct supervisor to go ahead and shove their whole guilt-tripping propositional dilemma as you pack-up your briefcase and hit the remote start button on your car's key chain.    

It's not that I don't appreciate the incredible value of the narcopetro buck, or understand that not everyone has it anywhere near as easy as I have; just because my long list of media projects might not have generated any profits insofar, it doesn't eliminate the possibility of a future hit. You'd almost have to drag me kicking and screaming into yet another full-time nightmare of a work-job. 

You can lead this Manchild to the nearest HR intake stream, but you cannot make him drink the Kool-Aid. As weak as this might sound, it's doubtful my patience is enough for too many eight-hour-days in a row. I can't suffer managerial incompetence, and I'm bothered by  murky expectations in which my time begins to feel like more of a liability than an asset when it's simply due to bad planning... I seem to have a keen sense of when a dollar isn't being optimized, and I don't feel the need to waste my time at the beck-and-call of some overlooked overseer who thinks it's funny to waste capital because they can. I won't be a party to someone else's wastefulness, and it's also why I prefer part-time commission or contract jobs where my expectations are clear, my time is valued, and I feel accomplished and fairly compensated at the end of the shift.    

I've witnessed enough clearly preventable madness in the warehouses, kitchens, and big-rig cabs to begin to suspect that some people might even thrive on it. Not me. I'm also not big on allowing myself to be swept-up into a mass hysteria movement. Big crowds are always a potential powder keg of chaos primer. I'd just rather stay home and write about my boring old life! LOL!

cHEErs 

    

  

Sound of Songs in the Soundcloud Cloud

When I'm not busy sleeping or sharing my cynical outlook on so many, many things, you're prone to find me watching television, smoking, or eating something.

From time to time I get song ideas floating around the periphery of my mind. Fleeting notions of some melodic progression... a path for some lyrical meandering perhaps. If things are quiet enough (all my domestic obligations met) I can relax with my guitar -  flesh out a rhythm progression and maybe layer a bass line on the top string, and then usually dropping it down twelve steps later - a basic technique I sometimes resort to, seeing that I don't currently have a bass guitar.

I used the pitch-shifting function in the multitracking software unreservedly in this rap I rapped. While there is a wee bit of guitar in the mix, it actually started-out with my ambitious attempt at beat boxing.

I see no reason why I should not consider the image of Mila against the moon as my seal of authenticity. A cropped image of my pet jet black dog, spectral inverted, and superimposed over a negative exposure of our moon.

It's been a trend of late that I start a new recording out by laying-down an even progression on the guitar to carry the whole thing, but sometimes you might want a more spaced-out affair, quite unlike this plodding instrumental I mixed-up one afternoon:


I'm fairly new to Soundcloud. I seriously hope to remain an associate content provider in good standing, as it has seemed to provide a reliable platform for my productions. I can't be too sure how Soundcloud performs on other systems, so please let me know of any glitches.

One thing that's certain about my novice internet music productions is that they haven't insofar generated dime number one. Any of my musical stuff! Not that I was expecting it. My work has all been volunteer up to this point. Still, if you happen to know of a circumstance of anyone profiting from it, apart from Soundcloud and whatever is entailed in their Cookie policy, I'd be pleased to be informed of such activity. Not to protest unauthorized use of my creations necessarily, as my primary reason for nesting in the Soundcloud is the potential world wide exposure only the web can provide anyway, but just to know if someone is digging my sound in the cloud.

Top Priority: Preserving Mediocrity

With every day that passes, my level of disgust for humanity at large intensifies as my confidence in societal institutions diminishes. I take to Twitter to lash-out - attempting to serve-up as much contention in 140 characters as possible:

I could care less about how shitty the state of public schooling is. Innumerate graduates are easier to rip-off. Dumb it down further.
— Inasmuch (@moremoreenough) March 23, 2014

What I really mean is that: while I'd love more than anything to see young people emboldened through solid public education, my disillusionment with the system now exceeds any hope I might have once harboured for salvaging a defunct system. I wouldn't even consider bringing kids of my own into this world unless I were in a position to see them through a private school that isn't encumbered with the idealistic expectation to be all things to everyone.

Though I don't doubt that there a brilliant minds working to improve the curriculum, I also strongly suspect the lurking presence of overarching bureaucratic forces who's top priority is not improved education, but self-preservation. In other words, it's in their own best interests to see that the system remains in a state of semi-disrepair.

So yeah... that's how I sum it up. Logic might suggest that innumerate graduates are typically easier to fleece. If you can't compute a compound interest rate, make valuation appraisals on the fly, or you fail to optimize your budgeting because you'd rather just throw money at the problem than deal with the anxiety of crunching a few numbers on a ledger, people will take advantage... and happily take your earnings.

Evidently, I care more about issues surrounding education than some people, otherwise I wouldn't have taken the time to address them here. I'm in a camp that believes educational excellence can be achieved without all the gimmickry and interference from experimental approaches that treat schools like laboratories. Like any system, a school system is only as good as its weakest link, and all the technology and money in the world cannot a good teacher make.



 



  

A Bad Day? Let's just say this past decade might have been better!

Yesterday afternoon, I logged into Twitter to survey the fallout from the previous night's online revelry only to find my account in the penalty box! I just sort of sat there staring for a bit... not exactly surprised, but a little incensed.

About once a week or so, I guzzle an unhealthy volume of beer while I'm engaging in social media. What might seem like clever or cute statements at the time, often turns out to be lewd, lascivious, and outright delusional nonsense. It's embarrassing, sure, but since I'm not affiliated with any public office or high profile organization, it's doubtful my verbal indiscretions are capable of causing any sort of PR harm of any kind.

I suppose I have about as much of a chance of discovering who was responsible for reporting me to the thought police as the whereabouts of Malaysia Air's missing Boeing 777 has of being divined by a Muslim witch doctor performing shamanistic rituals on the terminal floor. Personally, I would never attempt to silence anyone by way of tattletale tactics. Period.

In the way some movie actors claim to be averse to watching their own performances on the big screen, I leave it to my close friends to inform me if I'm crossing any ethical lines in my writing. I don't find it especially helpful to review whatever facetious vomit I sloppily hammered-out through bloodshot eyes at 2:00 AM.

When someone asks, "What's the difference anyway?" chances are, they don't really want to know if one exists.

My following on Twitter is a highly diverse assortment of personalities - one that I've amassed organically over the course of five years or so. Having a presence on Twitter is important to me, but not so important that I'll begin self-governing my own beliefs to acquiesce to some vaguely defined set of schoolyard conventions. Agreeing to abstain from egregiously making unsolicited mentions seems reasonable enough, but golly gee... in this age of political correctness, it's just a matter of time before some feminazi accuses someone of misogyny for asserting so much as a shred of masculinity. It seems these days one need walk on eggshells  lest simple observations are deemed as sexist, racist, hate speech, or some other ist.  

I admit that I was probably colouring far enough outside the lines to warrant having my account thrown into the Twitter Gulag. I hope anyone who was genuinely offended by my remarks can understand that it was merely the ravings of a drunken lout in a state of temporary insanity.