Archive for May 2007

May 23, 2007

Getting It Right

11:19 pm | My Life | Comments: 5

I have a great plan for getting in shape. I’m taking out a membership at a local gym, and as a bonus they have this great free introductory period. The idea of a gym is great, really. Why buy expensive exercise equipment of your own that will just collect dust when you can have craploads of thousand-dollar ellipticals and back-rowers at your disposal for a small monthly fee? The real genius of the plan is that I’ll enjoy the benefit of an immediate fitness increase just by having the membership card in my wallet. I hear the sheer proximity can give you washboard abs.

May 16, 2007

Science Again

6:34 pm | News | Sci/Tech | Comments: 1

Drudge posted a great link today to a blog post at the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment & Public Works detailing the shift of momentum in the scientific community away from the media-generated mass hysteria of man-made climate change disaster to the realization that the current global warming trends are far more likely linked to solar cycles than they are to rising “greenhouse gas” levels in the atmosphere. That was a great sentence, if I don’t say so myself.

What this goes to show is that if you can find 100 scientists to spout nonsense about how humanity will be responsible for creating a global-warming catastrophe in the near future, you can find 100 scientists to refute the claim. Lately, it seems that the “global warming skeptics” have been gaining the upper hand. I think one problem with the position of the global warming alarmists is they have the moronic glory-hunting media on their side. Eventually, the media’s method of putting story before substance is going to backfire and the story will suddenly be how wrong people like Al Gore are.

In other science-related news, Bird Flu hasn’t gone away and is still the real global calamity waiting to happen. Lately, the H5N1 Avian Influenza has spread to Indonesia and Japan. It’s killed 172 people worldwide so far, only 39,999,828 people short of the World Health Organization’s death toll predictions. Continue being afraid!

May 13, 2007

Age and Stuff

12:22 am | My Life | Comments: 2

Today the Dub turns 24. It’s definitely one of those transitional stages of life. Depending on what group I’m associating with, I am either a young know-it-all or an old guy. It’s nice because it’s easy to throw people off and keep them guessing about what’s really going on in your head. Growing a beard makes people think you’re trying to be older. Playing drums in a rock band makes them think you’re trying to be younger. Working 9-to-5 at an office desk job convinces them you’re old, then growing kinda-long hair and wearing a baseball hat backwards at an office party throws them off again. The truth is you’ll never know what’s going on in the Dub’s head for sure. Not until I’m 50 and still trying to pick up chicks at the student union. At that point it’d be pretty obvious, one would hope.

May 4, 2007

Sometimes You’re Down

11:00 pm | Random | Comments: 6

Every so often I wish that the world’s system of happiness was legitimate. It would make life alot simpler if you knew that you’d need to get a million dollars in your bank account to be truly happy. That way, everybody would be motivated to get said million dollars in said account and eventually we’d all find a way to make it happen. It’s not as easy as that, though. What’s strange is that it’s been proven that stuff can’t make you happy. This to me is proof of the existence of a divine being, specifically one that created us for a specific reason beyond simply having stuff. I mean, otherwise why wouldn’t stuff make us happy? It really should make us happy. The fact that it doesn’t leads the more rational of chaps to look beyond stuff to the real source of this happiness nonsense. The less rational of chaps probably doesn’t care because he’s too busy watching Prison Break.

May 2, 2007

Nerding Out

6:55 pm | My Life | Sci/Tech | Comments: 1

Ah, Pentium. That name will always evoke emotions of joy and giddiness. Those among you who haven’t gone through a computer nerd stage won’t understand completely, but just imagine something you really, really, really wanted. Even after you got it, there was a better one that you wanted. If you spent more money than you could even imagine on getting the best one, a month later there was a better version of it that you then wanted. The wanting just never stopped; it was (and is) the ultimate carrot on the stick that promised you joys never-ending but could never satisfy you. That has been the experience of late 90s and early 21st-century nerds. I will refrain from telling my “first computer” story here, to avoid sounding like every computer science professor on day one of every computer science class.

I often say that I was a wanna-be nerd in college. Computer gaming and game-related web development in my teens convinced me that I liked computers, and based on that assumption I studied computer information systems in college. The truth, which I realized around my junior year, is that I just liked computer gaming, and computers and technology as a whole really doesn’t do a whole lot for me at all. I just didn’t fit in with the other kids in class that got extremely excited over the latest Windows version as well as anything and everything that Google happened to have done that week. That being said, I’ve been able to take the degree and gain some real-world benefit out of it, and against all odds one of the two IS Majors at GVSU that didn’t own a laptop (neither did Mark) is now an I.T. professional.