Flying Gogoplata

The sound of chalk on a chalkboard is an awful noise. Just horrid. I think I have habituated myself to the sound over the years of hearing it, but paying attention to it makes me nauseous.

So I’ve been sorting through a lot of spam comments since I’ve started linking to all of the decal blogs, hence yesterday’s post. The linking, I’m sure, has increased my visibility just enough to encourage a regular daily spam count of about 12-20 spam comments per day. Which, as indicated before, can be a little depressing. My options, as I understand them, are as follows:

1. Continue as before, requiring approval for all comments and sorting out the crap
2. Requiring authentication for comments, removing all spam comments but making it far less likely that my very tiny readership will comment.
3. Try out one of WordPress’s spam filtering plugins

At the moment, I’m clearly leaning towards the 3rd option, despite the fact that playing with this stuff in my only production space scares me. The WordPress recommended spam filter is Akismet, so I think I’ll start with that (unless, of course, anyone else has any strong recommendations). I also figure that since I’m going to be up to playing with things, I might as well roll up to the week old WordPress 2.1.1. They’ve got a buttload of bugfixes which are all the rage these days. I won’t hold my breath for a “post preview” feature, though it does surprise me that something like that isn’t built in by default.

Is comment spam a problem for you all? How do you deal with it?

The ratio of spam comments to actual human comments I get is disgustingly tipped towards the somethings posing as messages…

*AHEM*

…(…hint…)…

It’s amazing to me that in avoiding doing work, I think of every possible, mundane thing to do to procrastinate other than write. I wish my blood craved it. I wish my mind preferred it. But, for sanity’s sake, I keep myself safely outside my own head and daringly inside others’. If my frustrations repeat themselves, my apologies.

Judging by both the frequency and the content of my classmates’ blogs in the past week and some change, I have come up with the following formalization of our collective state.

B=M^-1

Where B=The number of blog posts per week and M=the number of midterms per fortnight.

It’s trite, I know. I apologize for nothing!

I am behind roughly a full week in my writing. One would think that a 3-day weekend would be an inspiring time for writing, but alas, it has done little for me but allow me to twiddle my thumbs. Truth is I haven’t been really inspired to write since Sweet Dreams, which is sad because that’s almost a full two weeks without having written anything substantial, much less anything good. It really sucks because that piece was the first time I actually needed to write something internally and it came out in a way that people actually liked (thanks for all the feedback, by the way). I was hoping things would continue on that path, but I’ve been dry for quite some time.

It’s partially due to lack of inspiration, but also somewhat to lack of priority. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up by the end of this week. Some topics I have in my queue are my poor leetle car and the writer I’d love to rip off. In the mean time, this is the best I’ve got…

While reading the title how many of you thought of these? I’d venture to guess not many of you did. I’d even venture to guess some of you might have had the urge to give me a severe tongue lashing if I had continued on the presumed topic. Unless you happen to be in my Animal Cognition course, in which case, the semantic ambiguity would have been lost on you.

Here’s a sample of a conversation from class –

GSI: {Referring to an Experiment} I’m not sure if we’re looking at tits here or not…
Student 1: The professor said something about tits, but she also said something about pigeons, too
Student 2: I’m pretty sure it’s pigeons
Student 3: {looking up from notebook} Well I have Great Tits.
GSI: Well, they might be Great Tits.
Student 2: I just double checked my notes. I actually have Great Tits too.

There was almost a whole hour’s worth of conversation like this and not one person was even so much as holding back a giggle! Now, I’ll admit that it’s a bit of a juvenille Michael-Scott-ish joke to make, but if someone sets it up that many times…can we at least just admit that I’m not the only one making the association?? I mean, I’m not the biggest fan of that phrase either, but you have to admit it’s at least kind of funny when taken out of context. But no, we’re all grown up scientists and are above such base forms of humor. Way to make me feel like an asshole, Psych 121!

Totally weak, I say…

I realize that I have made reference to my hatred and cynicism in several posts and comments. I am not nearly as hateful and cynical as I would make myself seem. Unlike Andrew, however, I wish I could live up to this image. In my head, there is a very detailed marker of how I idolize the end years of my life.

Atop a high, remote hill somewhere along the Eastern Sierras sits a wooden house, leaning slightly to the right, paint worn and chipped. I sit in my bathrobe, on a rocking chair, on the porch of that house, hair graying and falling out, teeth yellowing and falling out, likely with a testicle peeking out from under the bathrobe, visible from various angles. I hold a rifle across my lap, not out of fear, not out of any salient need for protection, but because it offers me a kind of companionship that my withering, mangy mutt of a dog can no longer provide due to the senility he has developed after 16 and a half years of life. The house has one livable room, the other two are used for food preparation and for keeping the massive store of mostly dried foods that I have prepared from the flesh and organs of the various species I have popped with my rifle. Ammunition is kept easily accessible to me but safely out of reach of any intruders that may happen by. The roof has several accessible vantage points from which I can successfully eliminate wave after wave of oncoming approachers should I need to. As a last resort, an even larger storage area is accessible by several rigged entrances leading to a vast fortified cavern underneath with even larger food and ammunition stores and an extensive tunnel system leading to various treacherous regions in the Sierras that I have thoroughly mapped in my head should I need to re-take my fortress. Various locations in the surrounding ranges have clear shots of the house should I need to thin a few of their numbers before returning from another tunnel to slaughter those remaining. I am prepared for the nuclear apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, the biblical apocalypse, and any other kind of apocalypse you might think of. I am truly King of the Hill and I’ll be damned if anyone is going to move me from it. This is what I am.

Or rather, what I wish I could be. In actuality, I am 22 and I have 5 siblings. I live in cooperative housing which I work daily to try to improve. I have been described as sweet and cuddly. Every attempt I have made to describe myself as bitter and old have been met with laughter. I love having people around me and often require physical contact to stave off anxiety. I am arrogant and foolish and am at nowhere near the level of precision and expertise required to stave of any sort of apocalypse. I’m not even as crotchety as I would like to be.

One thing blares out of this comforting dream that makes it impossible to realize in any future with me in it: it entails that I be thoroughly alone. While we were dating, my best friend always threatened to never marry me should I continue to strive to be this person. While this is no longer explicitly a concern for me, it still does make me think of who I would have to give up to live up to this idol. Family. You give up a lot of yourself to rely on other people, and as Jessica so aptly illustrated, it’s a very risky business to get into. It definitely requires a lot of energy to maintain. It is, in fact, exhausting. But one does so on the assumption that there is a greater benefit to everyone, and on the whole, to put in that energy. As far as I can tell, this is mostly true.

But when it’s not, my deeply embedded mountain man fights tooth and nail to come to the surface. My voice gruffs up to be sure my rants are read as complaints and not whining. All benefits of doubt are revoked. Nothing will get done because nothing ever does. We are all doomed to failure so why would we prepare for anything else? And damn you to hell if you try to change my mind. Mind changing? HA! That’s for hippies! I rant about how wonderful it would be to live in a shanty atop a hill with only my mangy dog and trusty rifle. I go to this dream for comfort and solace whenever bitterness and bile creep up my throat onto my tongue.

And I am continually coaxed into my world of trust and interdependence, people laughing off the dream as image-manifest bitterness. I get up and continue as I was until the next time the plumbing explodes or a food delivery is fouled up. I always have my shanty to go back to when things inevitably fuck up.

I wish people could know exactly how serous I am when I say I wish to be that old man. Not for his bitterness and not for his loneliness, but for his incredible self reliance. He needs no one. He fears nothing. He has absolutely nothing to live for but himself. The choice of whether to live or die is entirely in his hands. The choice to be miserable or satisfied is entirely in his hands. And even then, the misery is empowering. It strengthens his fortification which makes him increasingly impossible to destroy. He is a few tiny steps away from immortality.

You know how some video games give little awards for various things like beating a level with the fastest time or killing the most people in a room? In Xbox Live these are called Achievements. You know, little badges of honor with which to gloat to your friends and compare your gaming prowess. I’m fairly certain that nerdity has a similar system of achievements. Things like knowing how to convert binary to hex on the fly, memorizing Euler’s proof, knowing that the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, being able to contribute to a discussion about whether Kirk or Picard would win in a fight, knowing why the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs is an impressive feat despite the parsec being a measure of distance.

Well today I have added a badge to my little list of Nerd Achievements: I have bought and now own a Rubik’s Cube. In 13 weeks time I will have learned to solve said cube. Pretty cool huh?

So I was walking home from my DeCal today pondering this. As a newly single person I will, from time to time, attempt to make eyes at passers by just to add some fun flirting to my day. It is also from time to time met with positive response. Today, to my confusion, I got nothing. Which was only really confusing until I realized that, well, I was holding a Rubik’s Cube in my hand… A pretty sure sign that at best, the Rubik’s Cube will not get you laid, and at worst, is just not cool.

Will that stop me from earning my nerd badges? It never has before, and in fact, I often earn them without realizing it. The real question is, will that keep me from reproducing? Well that story remains to be told. More in the next post on my best-laid plans to carry out before I die.

In my quest to feed my growingly discriminant ear, I purchased a wildly overpriced USB sound card (as the PC Card variants are not backward compatible with my ExpressCard slot). But I could not bear to install it on my slowing-with-gunk year-old Dell XPS M140 laptop.

So this Sunday I backed up all my necessary files onto my external hard drive and reformatted the little bastard so I could start from an oh-so-fresh-and-so-clean state. I generally don’t like to back up my settings because even those tend to suffer from rot after a while and though it takes a little longer, I end up with a much fitter, happier, more productive computing experience.

The end result of this is the fact that it is now Tuesday and I still haven’t gotten everything the way I like it. This has had an adverse effect on the various things I like to do from my computer. Things like homework, email, presidential documentation, job hunting, and of course, reading and writing blogs. But, while I am not producing any of those silly trifles, I am producing beautifully precise 5.1 Channel surround sound for my Danzig, War, and Chili Peppers listening needs.

So hopefully, by the end of the night, I will have learned to solve Rubik’s Cube, finished tweaking my computer, and posted a blog that is ready for review. If not…it will be up by Friday.