It’s not hard at all to find some well-meaning advice about success, usually something about achieving your dreams by dedication and hard work, and most of the time, it pisses me off seriously. It’s not that I have anything against advice or optimism, or provoking people to try harder, but the implication, far too often, is that this is all that it takes to become successful. Variations
Category: Rants
Audio workout
Prompted, yesterday, by yet another pointless and ridiculous update, not two days after updating The Girlfriend’s computer to be “current,” I finally decided to rid the site of any dependence on Adobe’s horrendous Flash plugin. Their software has been bloated, near-pointless, and risk-prone for years, and their updates consist of plugging every exploitable leak that
Book and theory review: Chaos
First off, a disclaimer: I’ve never been good at math, or at least, not since the sixth grade or thereabouts. I’ve struggled with it enough that I suspect there’s something fundamental that I missed, or a mental block or even something about my brain (could be that root beer incident when I was 10,) but so what who cares? The point is, someone may be inclined to
If you have to ask…
I know, I know, this is hardly ‘timely,’ insofar as what provoked the post anyway, but the content still applies, and I prefer to take the time to do the subject justice rather than dash off something so it’s “fresh.”
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Paris a few weeks ago, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, admitted that the attacks had
I’m getting old
Seriously. I can’t find an excuse for this.
I just finished typing up a lengthy post about a particular topic, and as I was viewing the penultimate draft, I decided to click on one of the links at the bottom – you know, the ones that show potentially related content? Only to find that I had already tackled pretty much the exact same details in the earlier post.
Now, I might have felt better
Convenient mediocrity
“Convenient mediocrity.” I mentioned it in an earlier post, and while it can be found in use here and there, it is not (yet) a common phrase, even if it is a remarkably common property. What it means (for my purposes here, anyway) is maintaining lowered standards because higher ones take too much effort. More specifically, it means accepting lower quality as long as it’s in a cool,
Hollywood agendas
Sometimes, it’s so obvious and manipulative that it’s sickening, and I’m starting to feel that we all should be doing our part in maintaining more realistic standards. Hollywood would have us believe that Charlotte A. Cavatica, the plucky protagonist from Charlotte’s Web, is a blue-grey Asian spider with a Beatles haircut and a warm, inviting smile, as seen
Again?
Oh, look – “Adobe Flash has yet another security issue and is automatically disabled to force you to update it. You know, for your protection.” Is anyone buying this bullshit?
HTML5. Or anything open source. Kill the monopolies.
And use the gif (pronounced “ghoti”) as you like, with my compliments. I made it last night using a clip from Young Doctors In Love.
What? It’s
Friends with benefits
I’m not surprising anyone when I say humans are a social species, both from the biological definition and from our own self-description. But it goes further than that – we’re socially-influenced and socially-dependent, meaning we make a really stunning number of our decisions based on how we feel others will respond to them, often without any other consideration at all. This isn’t
Seriously annoying
I had a post lined up to go Thursday night, and decided to wait a little, do a final check Friday morning before posting. The sleet had started Thursday at 5 pm, and while it soon turned into rain, the temperature hovered just above freezing, which has a curious effect. Things with a high ratio of surface area to mass – tree branches, wires, and so on – lose their heat