2005.01.10
"I never let hygiene get in the way of a good joke..."In this case, it was eating a french fry (that my Uncle Bill had given me) off of the pub tabletop when my own meal had been forgotten by the server...I treated the fry with great reverence, cutting it with a knife and fork like it was steak or something. It got a laugh.
Advice of the Moment
Oh, one other lesson I'd like to share with you from yesterday's reinstall fun...one practice I've had for a while now is to always put almost ALL my personal data in a specific folder on any given machine, preferably out of the usual C:\windows path (so not in "My Documents" etc...that way if you reinstall the OS without reformatting, there's a lesser chance the files will be wiped out when they reinitialize all the users.) I usually pick C:\data . That means there's only one folder you have to backup, or one folder to transfer if you move to a new machine. (I cheat a little and use my Desktop as semi-temporary storage space as well.) I keep the install files for any program I can't easily get off the web or have the original disks for in C:\data as well. I'd recommend this practice for anyone.
Webcomic of the Moment
--The Perry Bible Fellowship is a very funny, rather macabre cartoon.
Reminds me of the (even more offensive) Space Moose on a good day.) Rated PG13 or R at some points, like in this one, Not Today Little One. The Tree of Irony is pretty safe though.
I thought Reset was an interesting take on Nietzsche's idea of Eternal Recurrence. That idea was presented to me in high school, and then I saw it again in Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being", the rather outlandish idea that time is a circle, and we are doomed to repeat what we're now for eternity.
One assumption both Kundera and my high school history teacher made was to imply that neccesarily this is the first go round. That's a big assumption...it brings up the old bugaboos of "where does freewill come from in a materialist and likely more-or-less deterministic universe"? Would someone who was repeating what happened in the universe before, dancing to prescribed steps, feel as if they had free will? Can you not have free will but not realize it? Is that what we're all doing now? I think it really depends on what your notion of self is.
By the way, if you haven't seen it, Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams is a BEAUTIFUL, thoughtful series of essays playing with other alternate ideas of how time might have ended up working...really lovely stuff.