I like facts, when making my decision about something I work on facts. When you try to persuade me, use facts and logic. More importantly, when citing an incident as supporting evidence, I need specifics. An approximate date, and a description of what happened would be good. If you can't come up with this, don't be surprised if I think you're argument sucks, and don't just believe your argument on good faith. Also to those who do decide to engage me in a debate, if you try to prove your argument using unsupported facts, cited incidents with no details/dates, or by the virtue of you being smarter and more informed than I (without facts to support this statement) be assured I will seek to end this argument quickly.

If I ask for the argument to end, that means that I'm not convinced and will not be convinced. If you continue to argue the point, I will get rude and dismissive. People who clearly cannot be dissuaded from arguing with me, and have a past history of this can expect rude and dismissive from the gates. Its not pleasant, but I work with what tools I am given.

I'd like to invite a guest commentator, Morbo, to add to this topic:


DEBATING DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY!

Its time!

Okay, so we saw JoCo in concert Saturday night, it was freaking awesome. I recognized only some of the songs but I enjoyed the whole thing. Out of all the songs though, only one really stuck with me.

Some time ago JoCo entered a contest where you had to write a song that was a tribute to David Bowie's 'Space Oddity'. This brought about the song 'Space Doggity'. Despite the cheeky name, its a sad and true story. Apparently when the Russians were working on space travel they sent a Dog into space as an experiment to observe the effects of space travel on a living mammal.

Apparently the shuttle was not built for retrieval, official press releases stated that the lasted a few days when in truth within hours of launch she had succumbed to heat and fatigue. For whatever reason loss of human life never hits me as hard as these things do. I guess I just really like dogs.

Anyways, here's a video someone put together to the soundtrack as there is no official vid:



Update:

Found a few images worth looking at:
This is a shot of Laika in her harness pre-launch:


Apparently in 2002 this monument was erected outside the facility that lead the Sputnik 2 project:


"Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog." -Oleg Gazenko, Russian Scientist involved in Sputnik 2

I've been toying with this programming project, talking to this person and that person. Most have disagreed with my original plan. A tabletop gaming framework to automate most of the system/mechanics/math involved in TT gaming these days. My goal was to use a completely object-oriented design, built in Java. Many have disparaged Java, I faltered, I've looked at other options.

Until last night.
I had a dream, in it I saw my project come to completion. Pages of code passed in my vision surrounded by gnostic symbolism that should not have fit the imagery was that of harmony. I saw my goal realized, how every page, every graphical user element, flashed by me. Every last one of them, designed and implemented with Java.

Is this a prophetic vision? Or just a coincidence? I have no idea, but I am going follow this vision, and see what I end up with.

Time for the marks from last night:

Social Studies: F- Comments: Being confident and being rude are not the same thing! Being rude is a failure
Vocabulary: F- Comments: Guest and Resident are different words, that do not confer the same rights

Other Comments:
Do not make your problems my problems, truth be told, they're not my problems and shouldn't become so. It was pretentious, crude, and demonstrates a lack of social awareness.

Final Evaluation: Unacceptable

Figured I'd post an update here since I've neglected to do so for some time.

New job--well new rotation anyways - I love it, I could see this being a career even if I regularly put in 9-10 hours a day, 5 days a week. I do a lot of programming, scripting, technical tinkering, and things of that nature. I am home.

Went to VT for vacation with the family, it was nice to kickback for a while, but my family can be a bit much in extended doses.

atticdoor and I are looking to set a date, probably Fall '10 at this point. We'd have too little time to plan if we tried for '09.

Still living with godsaslug in the apartment, all good on this front.

I'm planning to make a full migration from my, to put it sedately, not-quite-right copy of Windows to a full Linux-based desktop and laptop set up (I'm going with Ubuntu of course). I'm preparing for this change over as we speak, I'm just uncertain as to the approach to take. I could just dive headfirst, back up music/documents and full format GO! or do a dual boot, test to make sure my games and passtimes work completely then do carry through.

I might just go for the full shebang since I know WoW runs, and thats the big one I need to have running right away. This mostly being because I hate waiting.

I'd just like to get onto an operating system where I don't have to worry about some Corporate overlord shutting me down because I don't tithe.

Worst comes to worst, I'll ask for Windows 7 for my birthday and switch back then.
tl;dr - I'm doing about the same, and have been very busy with work, otherwise life is good.

Also, feel free to hit me up on AIM, I should be on 24/7 with my cell phone these days.
EDIT:href
Running completely in linux now, so far so good, I've got some screenshots here of my desktop as I have it configured. I decided to go for a Steampunk theme with the config:
( Read more... )

The pup came home today! It only took one day for me to appreciate how much I like her bothering me all the time.

Then she crawled under my bed and took a 5 pound shit.

Its great to have her home.

I think my favorite pass time is about to get the fun sucked right the hell out of it.

Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but I don't think so.

Okay I started a blog independent of LJ, I find this is not a good medium for what I like to post about, since it tends to eat up.... real estate on other people's friend pages.
Here's the link:
http://someonesafterlife.blogspot.com/

I'm getting so sick of this shit.

Vague Statement: Things are gonna get weird... In other news: Incoming puppy!

To those of you who may have been deluded into thinking I enjoy:
1) Getting woken out of a sound sleep to discuss a game I run
2) Getting slapped in the face, hard enough to stagger me for NO GODDAMN REASON

If you somehow thought I would think these things are OK or somehow acceptable I have a follow-up request:

Go Fuck the Devil in Hell.
~John Gabriel

No seriously, I will NOT tolerate this bullshit.

1) What is your least favorite TV show or movie and why?
Grease, a wildly popular movie that sends what I feel is the worst message to people.

2)If you were gay, who would you do?
Might as well go for gold, Brad Pitt

3)If money were not an issue, where would you want to live (location and type of dwelling)?
Castle in the Icy North Most likely northern Canada, using my financial pull to get my friends up there as well.

4)How many surviving grandparents do you have?
My Mother's parents are both alive, My Father's have both passed away; though I still have my step-grandfather.

5)What's your favorite ice cream flavor?
Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup

Post comments here and I'll hit you with five questions, maybe... if I bother.

3 Exams down, 3 Final Papers down, 3 Final Project Presentations down. I have one last Report to finish, this is a big one, its my Senior Project's final paper.
I'm so close to graduating I can almost taste it, after Monday I will be done completely and simply have to wait and see. The actually ceremonial crap is on Sunday, the 18th so theres something of a wait time in between.
In other news, my official move in day is the 12th, this coming Monday, so things are hectic around here to say the least. Its a good kind of hectic though.

Also, on with the 80's Tribute:

This thought has occurred to me:
So many people I know seem to stress themselves out about hanging around people they don't really know. I suspect that a large part of this stress comes from the fact that many, not all, of them seem incapable of acting on gut instinct. For these people there must be an in depth analysis of every word, phrase, or facial expression that comes into play into interaction. My question to you is this:
"Have you let yourself run on gut instinct in a social interaction? If yes, how did it work out, if no, then why?"

...that I am not entitled to get mad at other people. Apparently its ok for someone to get mad at me, but if I get mad? No sir, thats unacceptable. Is this some mandate of my social disposition? I can't actually remember the last person that apologized to me for doing something that got me angry. I'm always just expected to forgive and forget.

Or is this expected because no one who makes me mad has any comprehension of what made me angry? This is possible but, given that a lot of people know exactly what will make me mad, it hardly seems like a reason to let people off the hook every fucking time.

I dislike selfish people, and never apologizing for anything is about as selfish and self-centered as it gets.

No seriously, fuck you.

Also, this should go with out saying, but spare me the 'OMG, I soooooo sorry about x, we're still friends right? ;_; It doesn't fucking work that way, apologies don't work when they had to be asked for, it lacks sincerity or value for the person receiving it; ideally there should be no need to ask.

I recently discovered that my Facebook profile has an "Honesty Box", when this arrived I'll never know but regardless I went surfing through it, most of it is rather nice pleasant things that do bear repeating as they're not important. One did catch my eye, and I was a bit surprised, it read:

" You're a self-righteous jackass with a superiority complex. You are not a font of wisdom."

The box doesn't say who posted it, simply that they are female. I was mostly taken aback because while I don't agree with the statement I can't easily refute it. More importantly I would like to know how I made this impression. Not looking for hugs here, just curious do I come off as Self-righteous and with a superiority complex?

Yeah, I headed into work in about 5 minutes.

Stupid disaster recovery...