Category: Geekiness

I think your plan backfired…

Ok, I wasn’t necessarily going to write another blog post today, but I went to go look at my stats since I haven’t really been caring for the blog for a while, and I noticed something weird, the page hits were really high.

Even stranger, a lot of the hits seemed to come from here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/01/11/how-bout-we-stop-this-trend-in-its-tracks/

Um… That’s PZ Myers’s blog…. WTF is he doing linking to me? To, of all things, this blog post: http://taocowboy.blogspot.com/2007/11/reflections-on-devconnections-part-i_10.html

Well, as it turns out, the blog post was about booth babes at tech trade shows and a policy at the most recent Skepticon that discouraged booth babes. So I checked it out. I kind of stopped reading PZ a while ago, There’s a very negative vibe over at his blog and he seems to attract a very hateful crowd. I don’t give people a pass for being asshats just because they’re atheists. If you want to have a rational discussion with me, I’m game. But f your response to dissenting opinions is to be an asshat, I have better things to do with my time. That’s why I don’t spend any time reading PZ anymore. He and his readers seem to thrive on the very vitriol we insist to theists that we don’t spew. I want no part of that, so I choose not to participate. Don’t get me wrong, PZ is brilliant and I enjoy reading his explanations of science, but the vitriol gets old. It’s the same reason I decided not to participate in Atheism+ but rather dropped out of the atheist community. I have another blog post on that topic in the works, but the short version is Jenny McCreight came to Kansas City and changed my mind about Atheism+, but there’s still a lot of vitriol in that community, so while I agree with the virtues they espouse, I choose not to participate.

So back to the blog post: PZ didn’t link to me (ah damn). But one of the commenters did. Round about comment #140 a commenter with the unlikely handle of nightshadequeen posted a link to my post from five years ago about my trip to DevConnections and my experience with booth babes. The link read “*sigh*” and then she posted a large excerpt from the post without comment (without my permission, I might add. That content is technically copyrighted, but never mind that).

The interesting thing about this is that as far as I can tell nobody responded to her (I assume it’s a “her”), but quite a few people followed the link. That much I can tell from my blog stats.

My first thought is “how long did you scour Google looking for that? Couldn’t come up with something original on your own to say?”

My second thought is that she completely and totally entirely missed the point. Had she been inside a barn with a shotgun she would have missed the inside and blown her own foot off. I’m not condoning booth babes. Had she actually bothered to read the post instead of just copy/pasting it into a comment to get a little attention from the Pharyngula crowd, she might have gotten the point. She strikes me as somebody looking for a misogynist to fight. I suggest she contact my ex wife if she wants to pick a fight with somebody setting the women’s movement back by decades. Or centuries. Millennia, more accurately.

The point to the post was to chronicle my experience and my thoughts at the convention. I didn’t hire the booth babes, and they’re not why I went. It was an experience. I expounded on the fact that these vendors that do that sort of thing do so purposefully, and it works. It’s a normal biological reaction for a male to be attracted to an attractive woman of the variety that you normally only see on TV and to go butt-ass stupid around them, and they played me beautifully like a violin. It doesn’t help that I was married to a psycho bitch at the time and that I’m a geek who doesn’t normally attract attractive women. Honestly I wasn’t offering any opinion for or against booth babes, but I would be just as happy at a convention without them. The vendors, however, would not. It was also FIVE FUCKING YEARS AGO. My views have changed so dramatically since that post it’s not even funny. I didn’t even consider myself an atheist at the time.

So the total net result here is that my stats shot way up and I think I picked up a few new readers. Not, methinks, what nightshadequeen was aiming for. I find this kind of funny. It’s nice to have a few new visitors but the regulars at Pharyngula aren’t necessarily the kind of readership I was looking for. I’m not entirely sure I want to get noticed by those people. I like the open comment policy I’ve had so far and would had to have to get my own “ban hammer” as they like to go on about over there.

Introspection

Today I pushed my boundaries.

Every few years or so I seem to go through some kind of change. The best way to describe it is that the answer to the question “Who am I?” changes. I couldn’t tell you what they all are, but I remember a few. A significant one was the one that led me to leave the cult. Another one happened a mere year later when I finally shed Christianity. Yet another happened in May of 2007. That’s the year this blog was created. Another in June of 2008 while I was in Minnesota. The most recent one was November of 2010. I filed for divorce the next month.

Now we come to August 2012. I’ve had a small handful of relationships since being kicked out of my house, ending with the most recent one. I gave her my heart. I couldn’t tell you exactly why I did. Phrases that I put no merit in like “soul mate” and “meant to be” come to mind, but the fact of the matter is I think she and I were a good match. Possible the best match I’ve ever had. We just… clicked. If I could describe my dream woman, a completely made up woman who embodies all of the traits I find attractive, she damn near hits them all.

Then it all went to shit.

Whaaa? Trouble in paradise? How can it be? You two were meant for each other!

No we weren’t. To quote Tim Minchin “If I didn’t have you I’d probably have somebody else.” Relationships start with physical attraction amplified by pheromones and from that point on they take an assload of work. I think that last part is where we ran in to trouble.

So I find myself suddenly single, emotionally hurt, and a bit bewildered. It’s moments like this when you do your best thinking.

I realized that I’m not ready for relationships yet. I got out of a nearly two decade long marriage a year and a half ago. It officially ended less than two months ago. I’ve been dealing with nearly constant insanity from my ex and the court system of the great state of Kansas for what seems like a bajillion years now, while helping my children deprogram themselves and realize that crazy extremist fundamentalist Christianity isn’t the only choice they can make, and trying to reinvent my entire life all at the same time.

It might not have been the best time to decide to invest a lot of time and energy into a relationship.

So the past several days have involved a significant reexamination of my life. I came to a few realizations.

  • Being single fucking rocks, even at 41.
  • Casual dating with no commitment is ok.
  • Friends with benefits doesn’t work. It just doesn’t.
  • I don’t know who the fuck I am.

Oh I know, I exude mucho confidence here and all aspire to even be a shadow of my cool, but the truth is, I haven’t had much time to figure out who I am after the last change. But I do know this: I feel dead inside.

Every day I get up, go to work, and spend the better part of my day in a felt covered box dealing with somebody else’s problems. At the end of that, I might get a little time to myself, or I might have my kids. There’s not much time left for me at the end of that and what little I had I was giving away. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

So today I got up, put on my hiking shoes, went to a local park, and got myself lost. Really lost. This is a big park, and practically nobody else was there. I’m woefully out of shape and I had one bottle of water.

The point was, I was not guaranteed of making it back alive. Sure, the odds were in my favor, but there’s that chance that I might not. That was the key. I pushed myself past my endurance point and found out I had more, so I kept going. I finally reached the end of my endurance again, and found out I had yet more, so I kept going.

By the time I found my way back to where my car was a few hours later, I was drenched with sweat (it’s over 100 degrees here with Kansas humidity), exhausted, thirsty, and a smidge on the loopy side. My legs were so worn out I could barely walk. A few hours may not sound like much to some of you, but I went from completely sedentary to hiking maniac pretty much today. I had no endurance level, and I pushed the fuck out of it anyway.

AND IT FELT FUCKING AWESOME!!!

I mean it did and it didn’t, but pushing myself  so far past what I thought I could do gave me a feeling of being truly alive. I found myself laughing and the smallest things and just enjoying being alive.

Later I grabbed an old friend (“old” being a relative term since she’s 10 years younger than me and I’ve known her less than a year) and went back out at night to see the universe. It was awesome. It gave me a feeling of being connected with the universe. It’s awesome when you can look up at the sky, see a lot of stars (even in Kansas City they’re hard to see without getting out of town), and know not only what they actually are, but that your perception of them is really looking backwards in time to several different points time simultaneously. One may be 100 years ago, another only 4, another 6 billion. And every atom that makes up my body, every atom that makes up yours, every atom that makes up every thing on earth that we see was forged in a star like that. Not only that, but the star it was forged in died. It died so that I could be here. And it died over 4.5 billion years ago.

SCIENCE FUCKING ROCKS, BITCHES!

I’m still kind of figuring out where this is going, but I think this could be the most interesting change yet.

Spank your monkey

A “new” video from philhellenes I hadn’t seen yet. I say “new” because it’s new to me. It’s quite insightful, and goes a long way towards explaining me.

The Evolution of the Cowboy

As I write this, I’m sitting here watching Cosmos on Netflix on my XBox.  Coolest XBox feature EVAR.  I’m reminded of this video I watched the other night.

I know what he’s talking about.  It’s the oddest feeling when you’ve learned enough science that suddenly everything starts to fit together.  I’m reminded of the common Christian claim that Atheism or Science is a religion.  The stupidity of that claim aside, I’ve realized something: These kinds of moments are not unique to religion.  Religion has these kinds of epiphany moments.  So does music.  I remember my first musical “Moment” during a performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.  It was amazing.  I think I’d like to call it a Musicgasm.  You simply can’t imagine it until you’ve had one, it’s unreal.  They’re far too few and far between. 

Religion can have the same kind of moments.  I had one in the cult.  A Godgasm, if you will.  I know the allure of it.  People believe they’re feeling the presence of God.   It can be very hard to reason with someone who has had a Godgasm.

This is a Sciencegasm.  It’s totally unique, yet familiar.  I’ve had one.  Apparently that’s all you get.  It’s that moment when you realize that the Universe is glorious and amazing, awe inspiring if you will.  Everything clicks, and you realize just how awesome it is to be a part of the Universe and to understand it as we do, and it doesn’t require a supernatural being to appreciate it. 

What’s cool is that it only gets better.  We actually understand very little about our Universe, but we learn more every day.  A hundred, a thousand years from now, we’ll know so much more, but still not everything.  There’s always another amazing, awe-inspiring discovery to make. 

I can’t explain the unbelievable feeling of understanding how the pieces fit together, how we fit into our world, our Universe, and how even though we’re a small seemingly insignificant part of it, we’re still a part of it.  Atheism is just as, no, more gratifying than Religion.  I wish everybody could see this, but Atheists don’t proselytize.  I’m not recruiting for the Atheist cause.  None of us do.  The only reason we’re in a fight with Religion is frankly because they started it.  At some point teaching science became blasphemy.  At some point realizing that we don’t need a god to be good became a threat.   At some point no longer needing an imaginary Master became an affront.  When we fight back we have reason and science on our side, but facts are meaningless to people who have already made up their minds. 

It seems every Fall I undergo some kind of mental change.  I evolve into a newer, better being.  Well, sometimes it’s better.  This blog has chronicled my evolution over the past few years.  It’s time for another change. 

On this blog I’ve made some friends.  I’ve realized that conservatives, or at least Republicans, do not represent my values as a human being.  I’ve advocated Henry Rollins for President.  I’ve argued against voting party lines, and I’ve voted straight Democratic tickets.  I’ve espoused the virtues of Taoism, and I’ve abandoned it because of the value it places on ignorance.  I’ve ranted.  A lot.  I’ve geeked out.  I’ve complained about religious intolerance, I’ve been intolerant of religion, and I’ve abandoned religion altogether, although I’m pretty sure that actually happened a very long time ago.  I’ve really only just recently admitted it to myself.  I’ve cussed, and blasphemed, I’ve hoped, and I’ve wondered.  I’ve deleted the whole thing in a moment of anger, and I’ve painstakingly restored it after regretting my actions.  I’ve had spiritual epiphanies, and I’ve despaired for the entire human race.  I’ve grown as a human being, and it wasn’t always pretty.

I’ve discovered a lot about myself over the past few years.  Anybody who reads this blog regularly probably has too. 

I’ve been thinking about a new direction for several days now, and I think I’m going to do it.  Hopefully I don’t lose what little audience I may have acquired spewing vitriol over the interwebs for the past few years.  I’m absolutely in love with science right now, and I think I’m going to begin posting about this.  For one, just so that I’m not just bitching all the time.  For two, hopefully somebody will begin to see just what is so amazing about all of this.  For three, it’s a nice convenient place to keep track of the things I’ve learned.  Crap I wish I’d paid more attention in school!

With any luck the tone here will change.  With any luck I’ll open a few minds.  Mostly, I just don’t want to forget this stuff.  I would love nothing more than to return to college right now and rack up several doctorate degrees in various fields of science, but that’s simply not reality given the cost of living and the cost of college.  I’m also desperately trying to save for my children’s college, and sending myself back to school doesn’t help that cause. 

Well, here we go…

Star Wars Help Desk

Oh Cowboy, where art thou? (part deux)

You may have noticed a serious drop in the frequency of posts on the goodness we refer to as Another Idiot with a Blog.  There’s a reason for that.  I’m sure it’s a good one.  I’ll let you know when I think of it.

The truth is about every couple of years I seem to re-invent myself.  It’s not intentional, it just happens.  Usually after a breakdown of some kind. 

I’m going to be focusing on something else for a while.  Don’t worry, loyal legions of Cowboy-ites, the Cowboy is not gone.  The wisdom you need is still contained within the posts of this blog and will not go away (again), and I’ll still be back from time to time to impart more wisdom your way.  You’ll be angry at first, you might even turn away from your faith, but you cannot resist the Cowboy.  He’s not just a man, he’s a freakin’ force of nature, baby!  You’ll be back.

I’m working on another blog at the moment.  The reason is I’d like to be taken seriously for once, and let’s be honest, that ain’t happenin’ here.  For those who care, post a message or send me an e-mail.  If I like you and want you to know where it is, I’ll tell you.  If not, I’ll fart in your general direction, you silly English kanigot. (If you don’t get the quote, I can’t help you). 

I’m also spending a lot of time with my new Zune.  If I had only known how easy it makes it to follow podcasts, I would have gotten one years ago.  And it probably would have been an iPod.  Then I would have gotten angry at just how shittily Apple software runs on a PC, and chucked it against the wall.  Then I would have taken the shattered remains back to the Apple store demanding a refund.  There would have been an awful row after the resident Apple “genius” calmly explained to me that you can’t return a smashed iPod, as the smashing of said iPod voids the warranty of said iPod.  It’s right there under paragraph 411 subsection 831 part b, where it states that willful destruction of the iPod is cause for termination of the warranty.  Yelling loudly that the crappy iTunes software brought my poor PC to it’s four year old knees and eventually caused it to blue-screen itself in despair and that they should give restitution for the pain and suffering I’ve endured as a result probably wouldn’t help.  *sigh* That’s Apple for you.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been quite interested in XNA, despite my complete inability to produce a working game.  It turns out that if you subscribe to the Channel 9 podcasts tagged XNA, most of them were done by Mr. Rory Blyth (so far, anyway).  Who knew?  That guy’s everywhere.  I wonder how I could get him to move to the Midwest and come to work where I work?  I’d move to Portland, but the whole moving thing didn’t work so well last time.  We’re not talking about that anymore.

So, farewell for now, my lovely fans.  I love you all too!  Don’t despair!  Go forth and live eventful lives, and always say: WWCD? 

Are people really still falling for this?

My GMail account gets a LOT of spam.  I’m not sure how I ended up on so many spam lists, but I suspect GMail themselves are partly to blame.  There’s also the issue that there are about four other people in the country, and one in Australia apparently, who think my e-mail address is theirs.  These people are apparently not very bright when it comes to where and when it’s appropriate to give out your (or rather my) e-mail address.  They also appear to like to sign up for e-mail distribution lists on sites that apparently do not verify your e-mail address.  There’s not much I can do to stop it, but I do appreciate GMail’s rather thorough spam filter. 

Today I took a look at the spam folder.  I do this occasionally just to make sure there isn’t something there that shouldn’t be.  I generally get tired after the first two or three pages and just delete it all anyway.  Today I had 828 Spam messages.  That’s something like 36 times the number of real e-mails sitting in my inbox.  In fairness, I had just deleted several real messages from real distribution lists I’m really subscribed to, just because I know I’ll never get time to read them.  Sorry CodeProject.  But still, 36 spam e-mails for every 1 real e-mail I receive.  That is beyond ludicrous. 

As I’m looking through, I scroll past the messages letting me know important things like “Free pass for Enticing teens” and “Don’t Delay get Money Today” and “Vaigra cailis” (whatever the hell that is), offers for free Anti-Depressents, growing my organ to a big hulk (I prefer the piano, myself), Make myself 10 years younger, Branded watches, several in Chinese I can’t read due to a lack of speaking Chinese , Generic Meds, getting bang for my buck, Free Prescriptions, 90% prices, free Blackberry (that I can believe.  They would have to force one on me), larger rods (but will it fit in my car’s engine?), “Zohan’s secret to success”, the bailout package I need, an imperative to “stop being a disappointment in bed”, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.  And that was just today’s spam.

If it weren’t for spam filters, I would have sworn off e-mail by now.  That is absolutely ridiculous.  And why is it so damn hard to spell ridiculous?

Then one caught my eye.  It was so obviously a phishing scam it might very well have had blinking lights and a marching band playing “All your monies are belong to us, L00zR”.  I had a brief flash of those commercials where the old lady is giving a diatribe on identity theft in an inner city young boy’s voice. 

This one was a warning that my Chemical Bank account information needed verification.  Out of curiosity I opened it.  GMail dutifully put this disclaimer at the top:

image I know that’s hard to read.  It says (in a very danger sense arousing red color) “Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be.  Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information.”  Ya think?  I don’t have a Chemical Bank account.  I’ve never even heard of them.  I had to Google them just to find out they actually do exist.  I thought it was a made up name.  That would have to be the worst phishing scam in history.

Here’s the content:

image

I have to admit, that’s pretty good.  It looks real enough, and the styling looks just like the branding on the real bank’s website, but there’s just a hint of Engrish there.  Just enough to tip their hand.  No place I’ve ever worked for would allow that kind of grammar to go out in an official e-mail.  The link was disabled (Thanks again, GMail), but you can be sure if I had enabled it, it wouldn’t go to to that URL. 

This kind of scam has been around for years.  This e-mail is completely classic.  It’s better crafted than most.  For most of us, the first indicator that something isn’t right is the “I don’t have an account with that bank” issue.  The purpose, of course, it to hit the handful of people who actually do. 

Not long ago my wife asked me about a very similar message that managed to make it past three spam filters to her inbox.  I said simply “We don’t bank there, delete it”.  I then had to continue on to fully explain the scam that was occurring before she would believe me.  She finally deleted it, “If you’re sure”.  Yes, I am.

How is it, in this day and age, that there are still people who fall for this?  There must be, or they wouldn’t still be sending this kind of crap out.  I think I can safely assume that anybody who reads this blog is smart enough to see this for what it really is, even if it hadn’t landed in the spam box.  Have we, the technically elite, failed our not so technical counterparts here?  Have we somehow failed to let everybody know about the basics of e-mail security?  We must have, if there are still people out there running one of the oldest scams in the book.  They don’t need to make up new scams, the old ones are still working. 

If you haven’t told your wife, husband, mom, dad, sister, brother, half second cousin in law about what we consider to be common sense in handing e-mail, now would be the time.

Hey buddy, can you spare 400 Microsoft Points?

XBox appears to have noticed that they have a user base that consists of more than just teenagers.  As much as I hate, and have always hated, the term Gen-X, that’s the easiest way to group together people around my age group who have a common experience base around early video games.  Not to say we’re the only ones.  I’ve met at least two “Gen-Yers” (I apologize) who grew up with the very same games due to having “Gen-X” (last one, I promise) older siblings.  They got the hand-me-down Atari 2600 systems.  I still have one.  Most of the games still work.  Pitfall doesn’t, which sucks because that was always my favorite, but I’ve got re-released versions for Win95 and Playstation.  (Damn it’s hard to keep that stuff up to date). 

Now XBox has found the newest way to get me to spend my rather hard-to-come-by-lately money in the form of Microsoft points again.  They’re releasing all of my old favorites on XBox Live Arcade.  Bastards!  What a cunning, evil plan!

It all started with DOOM.  Oh the countless hours spent in the early nineties banging arrow keys and spacebars killing simulated 3D bitmap based hellspawn. I honestly don’t remember if the original DOOM supported multiplayer (I’ve still got it around here somewhere, I’ll check later) but I remember that DOOM 2 did.  I had countless hours of fun sneaking up behind my best friend with a double-barreled shotgun and blowing him away (that’s just fun to say), untill somebody picked up the phone and messed up the damn carrier signal on the modem.  Ah, modems: good times!

XBox released DOOM on XBox Live arcade a few months ago.  Something that primitive probably doesn’t appeal to today’s youth unless they’ve got a video game history fetish, but it’s nostalgic to those of us that pissed away our youth on it when it was new. 

Next was PacMan.  Oooh, I was GOOD at PacMan when it was a popular new arcade game.  Again, today’s youth would probably not look twice at it, wondering “where’s the damn plot line?  How do you win?”  You didn’t back then.  You proved your mastery over others and your right to rule as master of the tribe by showing how long you could survive the onslaught of digital ghosts on a single quarter.  PacMan was the very first “SuperGame”.  The first game that caused a craze.  Today’s market is so flooded with titles that there really aren’t any crazes any more, other than for consoles themselves.  Back then we had PacMan lunch boxes, PacMan bedsheets, PacMan pajamas, PacMan records (yes, records.  Not CDs.  Those big round black things you put on turntables as part of rap music today used to be a music distribution medium.) PacMan cereal (fortified with Sugar Frosting and High Fructose Corn Syrup), and on and on. 

Now we have PacMan on XBox Live Arcade.  I love it.  My kids hate it.

Then Galaga.  ‘Nuff said.

Then Frogger.  ‘Nuff said.

Missile Command, Warlords, and on and on.  Some are the original arcade versions.  Some have the original versions plus an updated version (to help the kids out with it.  Their brains can’t process 8-bit graphics). 

And Finally, the Coup de grâce, Duke Nukem 3D.  Oh, they’re killing me!  While money is still tight, I figure “Well, $5 for this game isn’t a big deal”, then another $5, then another, they sneak it in on you.  Then, an epiphany: I’m paying for games I already own!  How do they do that to me?  They’re preying on some kind of nostalgia weakness.  I’d be fascinated to know what the psychology behind it is.

Twitter: Crack for the Attention Challenged

I finally broke down and got myself a Twitter account.  I thought “Well, everybody else has got one.  And I might miss some Rory Blyth wisdom that gets sent only to twitter, and not to Neopoleon.com.”  In other words, I appeared to have been worried that something might happen on the Internet and I might not know about it. 

That kind of obsession reminds me of the time, back in the early days of the Internet, when I was on a Star Wars Newsgroup.  Remember those?  So being the Star Wars geek that I am, I posted a message that had some part of Empire Strikes Back quoted from memory.  That’s dorky enough, but one member noticed that I had gotten one word wrong, and replied with a full two paragraphs of flame about it. 

I always think of that when I want to convince myself that I’m relatively normal.  I choose to not remember the return flame, which I’m pretty sure made use of the word “Waambulance”.

Twitter is this bizarre stream of consciousness kind of thing.  After only one day on it, I’ve added a Twitter widget over to the right there, and set up my laptop near my chair so that I could periodically check if anybody had Twitted lately while watching TV.  It would be a shame if I were to miss one. 

The addiction, though, comes from the fact that posting on Twitter more closely resembles how my brain works than a blog does.  Maybe we’re all like that, but since I’m still lacking the Psychology degree, I can only speak for myself.  I tend to think in small text snippets rather than large articles. I’m sitting around watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles instead of packing for my road trip tomorrow.  That seems like something the world needs to know!  Tweet!

I ran across a brilliant article that covers this phenomenon.  http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0809021  Since there’s APIs for both Twitter and Messenger, I’ll be planning the architecture for my messenger plugin which will allow me to keep up with twitter all of the time, on my drive back.  Why?  Because A) Twitter says it supports IM but I can’t find anything that backs that up, B) I’m geeky like that, and C) since my car can’t drive itself, I can’t actually do any coding on the drive back.  It’s tempting to try, though.