One feature I'd love to see on deja.com: a link from every post to babelfish, so if I find something that looks promising, but happens to be in German, I can translate it on the fly without having to copy and paste the URL (making sure to strip it down to just the barebones URL, without all of the session info, etc.) into the Babelfish interface. That would be cool.
After watching
Apollo 13, I was filled with a sense that anything was possible. Thanks to
Matt, I just watched the first four episodes of
From the Earth to the Moon on DVD, and I now find myself filled with a sense that I was right, but I now have a much stronger sense of the toll that such heroics exact.
I'm obsessed lately, with the idea that there is something missing in my life, my generation, my upbringing, and my sense of self. The discipline, the bravery, the sheer effort of will, the astounding advances in technology that are the result of intelligent and at times somewhat plodding thought and activity, solving small problems one at a time in order to achieve great things. We are governed, in my opinion, by a sense that great efforts (and, it would seem, great wealth) are easy, that we can, through some blazing insight, accomplish more than the tireless pursuit of small excellences will bring. Maybe it's just me; I was for a time intending to be an artist, and believed all the idiotic myths of the artist as Vasari and the Modernists would have had us believe, the ubermensch that transcended all earthly hindrances to deliver a flashing vision of the divine. For a time after that belief in mythology was ruptured, first by psychology and sociology, and then later by sudden acquaintance with the pathetic idiocy of man as political animal, as egotistical self-serving seeker of transitory pleasure, I flirted with mysticism and the idea that logic could save us from ourselves. A quick tour through the joyless existence that many unemployed and underemployed liberal arts graduates endure made me take stock and realize that the basic necessities (food, shelter, love, and friendship) can drive anyone to abandon even their most cherished beliefs in an effort to survive, to thrive, and to be happy. Later still, I found that one can compromise, can still manage to seek the ideal through engaging the mundane.
I'm still trying to figure it all out. For me, that means spending time with history, with education, with service. I'm still very impatient, undisciplined, lazy. I am still filled with unnamed rage, with the irrational hope that insights and art will triumph, that justice will prevail, and that my efforts to achieve some form of greatness will be rewarded and recognized. In the meantime, I struggle with my own self doubt and a feeling that success must come as my due, not through prolonged and intense (and sometimes even insensibly boring) activity, even though I resist. I'm trying. I'm doing my best to remember that I have to be kind, compassionate, and patient. I seek out examples, in an effort to find someone or something that I can emulate, that will teach me lessons I need to learn. And while it continues to stare me in the face, I continue to be overwhelmed by the noise in my head, the thoughts that plague me like mosquitos, that I'm not worth it, that my value is on par with the same myths that led me to paint and draw and write. But I keep trying. And that's something,right?
I love
Emo Philips. I was curious what he'd been up to, but I'm not surprised he's found a more accepting audience in the British. (Thanks to Steve Sharp for the URL.)
Oh, and I got a powerbook today. With airport. I really like this wireless networking thing. Now if they could work on the wireless power supply, without exposing small animals walking around the AirPlug to death by shortwave radiation, I'd be
really happy.
A few observations upon revisiting my old fascination with P. J. O'Rourke, and applying his attitude to the things that trouble my soul from day to day:
- spam isn't offensive because it advertises teen sex, or tries to sell us things that nobody with a medulla would fall for, or because it usually involves deception or theft of service. It's offensive because so many other people work so hard to gather information about us, then make discriminating decisions as to how they should spam us. Most spam simply doesn't discriminate, and that's what bothers us.
- Microsoft isn't bad because it is a giant hulking corporate miasma (contrast it with IBM), or because it makes poorly designed software (though it does, there is much worse out there), or because it enables other people to make lousy software (Allaire's HomeSite 4.5 sucks without any help from Microsoft), or because it is a monopolist (which it is), or because it is basically a large marketing organization posing as a software company (which it is, though the legal and marketing departments are in a deadlock lately), or because it tries to destroy Open Source (Sun. ahem.), or because its leaders are the same sort of arrogant, lying swine that ran Standard Oil (they are). Microsoft is evil because it panders to the worst in people and -- there being so many of them, and so much to go around -- they make money hand over fist. Microsoft is the P. T. Barnum of their day, selling tickets to the circus exit.
- I write this 'blog as much to share certain information about myself (the books I'm reading, the music I'm listening to, what I'm doing and thinking) possibly in order to get feedback and suggestions on what to read next, what new music to listen to, and other things I could be thinking about, as I do to exert some control over what is, for better or worse, "public perception" of me and who I am. In a world where the grocery store's IT department knows I prefer Tylenol over Alleve, where the DMV knows I was four months late getting my truck inspected, and the average spammer thinks I'm black, it's nice to be able to shape this perception, to have some sort of control over it.
More later, perhaps.
Oh, and I spent some time this afternoon fixing bugs in the DHTML GUIs dynamic poetry game, so it will work in IE5/Mac. Not all there yet (there are some problems with the tab widget, for example) but it's coming.
So I built my first real, useful Macintosh application tonight. Oh, sure, it doesn't
really do anything useful
yet, but that's just because I haven't written the Palm conduit that will use the preferences file this application lets you create. :^)
Maybe now I will be able to sleep without counting out memory locations all night... (0x07BD4A50, 0x07BD4a60, ...)
Ya know, if there had been a better comics store in Bangor, I'd have read more X-Men. As it stood, I only got second-hand Sgt. Rock and Haunted Tank comix, which is good if the woods behind your house are infested with Nazi machine gun nests, but not much help dealing with your status as a mutant.