Club Silicon

Angries and Passives

I have found that there are two kinds of people in this world: passives and angries. The passive prefers to communicate kindly and tactfully at all times, but the passive's mind does not naturally draw towards other things... the passive is introverted in any number of ways. The Angry will think often of others, but prefers to communicate through criticism and anger. This isn't to say that passives don't get angry. Passives get angry at anger itself and criticism. This is a yin yang system.

What fascinates me is the perpetuation of this behavior and refusal to either analyze or change it. The conclusion is that people are not far removed from animals, and despite our intentions, we're unable to move beyond our limited physical (brain) capacity. Our constant expansion is admirable but in many endeavors ultimately foolish.

"Back in my day..."

There are a number of things I imagined I would say to younger people as I got older. One of them was "when I was your age, this Legg Mason building was a field filled with tall weeds". I would be referring to an intersection of West Street and Cathedral Street in Annapolis, Maryland. I have revised these sayings a bit now. One of them is:

"Back in my day, we didn't have to worry about metadata, podcasting, RSS, XML, blogging, or WIKI... we had our C:> prompt, our memory addresses, our RAM drives, our PC Tools and our floppy disks, and that was enough!"

Indeed it was. Now that PCs are far more mass market, there is even MORE complexity. Fascinating, and utterly too complex for most people to fathom to retain any level of familiarity that yields those little things like optimization, and dare I say it, art.

Rather than continue to write to myself I'm going to try to evangelize this site a bit. We'll continue next with some sort of marketing drive.

The World Rolls On

The world rolls on. What before was the ticking of a then "all the rage" cuckoo or grandfather clock is now measured in how many Viagra emails and CapitalOne No Hassle miles credit card offers you get. The world rolls on. What happened to those clocks?

It's time to release an album. It's time to become a good but still halfway young actor. Time to prove that you can operate in a business and get along with everyone while getting what you want as well.. almost all the time.

"The Birdcage" is a pretty funny movie. Varying people have varying levels of ADD, so this randomness can be interpreted as utterly meaningless and annoying or poetic. But in spite of even that... the world rolls on.

Home

What makes a home a home? To some, it is where the heart is, but this doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me, even figuratively. To others it is where you lay your head. This is more acceptable as a place to sleep, however uncomfortable, can be very welcome when we are fatigued enough.

I think the most deciding factor is familiarity. The more familiar we are with a place, the more comfortable we are with it, however unwelcome it may be on a daily basis. Everyone has their own memories that they recall that brings a level of comfort and peace, whether it is where they grew up, or where they spent their most formative years mentally. To me, Annapolis will always be a home. I compare Annapolis and the east coast of the United States to everywhere else I have lived, from Michigan to Colorado to Texas to San Diego. No place envelops you with its trees and makes you feel in a secure place quite the same. Then I stop and think to myself: if I feel this way about Annapolis, how must Jeanette feel about Texas? I moved out when I was about 22 and with the exception of 1997 I haven't moved back. Jeanette spent all of thirty years close to most of her immediate family. So, this would make her pretty homesick of course, and while I never doubted the concept, relating it to my own feelings made it hit home in a much more obvious way.

I can only hope that Nicholas and I can give Jeanette a home away from home that can approach the level of comfort that Texas and her family there gave her. If not, we'll just have to move back. ;)

An "intangible" is something that isn't easy to grasp, physically or mentally. In fact, an intangible is probably impossible to grasp. Club Silicon, in its efforts to mix human factors with technical interest, will introduce "intangibles" as my efforts to figure out things that most people wonder about, but often never come to any conclusions about. For the hardcore tech enthusiasts, the posts will be marked with a graphic title to make them easy to skip.

Today's intangible is about family life, when someone decides to put their own importance behind others. I have known many people whose fondest wish is to combine their past with their future when they start a family. They think that they can play video games, enjoy evenings out on the town with friends, and travel the same way they did before they were married or had children. Truthfully, it doesn't happen this way, and some decide that this is too unpleasant, so they end their relationships.

What these people don't realize is that they are just as important as the rest of their family. While it may seem that their life is over and choices have gone from endless to few, most people, especially women (dare I generalize? damn right I do) realize that the 'self' is extremely important, and sometimes you not only should think about yourself and do things for yourself, but sometimes you HAVE to.

When you realize this, it is much more easy to do things for others, and doing things for others makes you happier, rather than obligated.

So to put things in perspective, what do you do when you no longer have time to play World of Warcraft? What do you do when you can't go out dancing or drinking? What do you do when you aren't having sex? What do you do when you feel you can't play poker every Tuesday?

Simple. You do those things in a different way. Don't play WoW, instead watch the video with Leroy Jenkins. Don't go out dancing or drinking, but drink and dance at home. Have sex with yourself (interpret as you will, please). Play poker on your Palm Pilot or online with others. Play every other Tuesday instead. Point is, you've made a choice. Don't give up your life, and realize that you promised part of it to other people.