09.27.08
Posted in People, Personal, Politics at 1:42 am by qkslvrwolf
So part of the reason I go out and do things like contra dancing is to meet people. Mainly I do it for fun, but meeting people is nice too. And that is finally starting to pay off.
Tonight I went out to a contra a dance an hour or so away with a small array of very entertaining people fronted by J, who runs this blog.
Anyway, I had a great time, and if you followed that link and know me at all, you realize that this is a very good group of people for me to fall in with.
And, as for the last bit of that title, the nickname is “Bible Spice”. LMAO.
I got it here.
Anyhoo…I hope the debate got tivoed. If it did, I’ll likely watch it tomorrow. After fucking working. Blarg.
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09.26.08
Posted in Family, People, Personal, Philosophy at 6:39 pm by qkslvrwolf
So, my mother wrote this.
In response:
First of all, your usage is improper. LMAO is an emotional and physical expression, and doesn’t work when used as a pure abbreviation. One uses emoticons and their related txt shorthand to express emotional and physical communication that is not normally communicated in text or speech. This is intended to directly combat the inability of casual text based correspondence to communicate mood and feeling without delving into deeper and not necessarily more meaningful vocabulary trees. When used appropriately, it can mitigate the loss of connection caused by having a purely electronic conversation.
I should also note that for all that we worry about “neural pathways”, etc, sports records continue to be broken, sports and physical activity numbers continue to go up, and in general, folks continue to muddle through. We have more kids who are obese or completely overcome by electronic distractions, but frankly they are only more visible because as a society we don’t suppress and compress people into a very narrow “normal” the way that we used to. People are not different than they always have been, they are simply more visible because they’re not ostracized as much.
Video games also have a lot of POSITIVE influences on development, although like anything else the rule of “everything in moderation” still applies. As an expert opinion, I will site “The Kids are Alright”, which is a book written by a baby boomer who set out to write a book about the horrible effects of gaming and modern culture on kids, and then as he did the research and actually studied the evidence, came to the conclusion that things weren’t anywhere near as bad as they seemed…and likely were far better than in the tv and drugs generation that he grew up in. I keep recommending you read it, and you never have.
The next few decades are no more likely to be very interesting than your own generation’s control…which has produced such stellar examples as GWB and a country willing to let him get elected twice. I hardly think that the kids growing up on games that require thinking about consequences and living in an interconnected world where consequences are both immediately visible for instant feedback and historically trackable for going back and thinking about it can really do worse.
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09.21.08
Posted in Personal at 9:22 pm by qkslvrwolf
I had a couple of things I wanted to talk about that I though were very worthwhile, but of course I’ve forgotten them.
However, today I took a tour of the battle road via bike. I was out from the house for 6 hours, and the last 20 miles or so were back, so I rode hard. I’m freakin’ exhausted.
That’s all I got. G’night.
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09.14.08
Posted in Personal, tech at 4:19 pm by qkslvrwolf
So, the new version of ubuntu came out in April, and I just now got around to installing it.
There are a couple of reasons for that. First, while there are some very nice things in the new version, it’s not like it’s adding necessary functionality. Everything that I use works. Except that the games on linux still, mostly, suck. (The mostly there is actually an exception to the rule, not an example of the rule.)
But all my emailing and surfing and movie watching and productivity all worked just fine. So why upgrade?
Still, as always, I’m glad I do. Ever version is just a bit slicker and nicer.
Also, I did a complete reload, rather than an upgrade, but I’ve got my home directory on it’s own partition, so why I logged in after the upgrade, everything was still there and working, just like before. Except for the programs that I hadn’t installed yet. But when I installed them, they were already there, tweaked just how I like them. My amarok still had it’s database, my firefox still had it’s bookmarks. Everything was just there and ready to go.
Possibly the coolest thing about this was how my virtual windows installation (which had actually stopped working) just worked. Like a charm. And now I’ve installed heroes under it to give me a gaming fix without having to boot into windows. Just fire up ye old virtualbox and BAM, I’m playing heroes.
Pretty awesome.
Anyhoo…that’s it. Fun and easy upgrades with ubuntu. Try it today! ;-)
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09.02.08
Posted in Entertainment, Personal at 4:52 pm by qkslvrwolf
Two great book series, likely to be ruined by bad movie adaptations. Crap.
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