Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2004 January
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
|
| Eagles get tortured |
| 01.19.04 (11:39 am) [edit] |
Wow. The game against the panthers was one of the worst games I've ever seen.
I don't know why so many people thought the Eagles were going to make it to the Super Bowl. They had a few decent games here and there this season- a few miracle comebacks. But nearly all of the wins I've seen them win have been dreadfully ugly games. You can't keep missing tackles and dropping passes and expect to go to the Super Bowl. Eventually your luck will run out.
I literally almost fell out of my chair when I watched not one, not two, but FIVE guys miss tackles trying to stop a panther as he went into the end zone. FIVE- ON THE SAME PLAY. It's not like this guy was a particularly fast guy, either. They literally just slammed into him and yet somehow allowed him to keep on going, hands slipping off him as he went. That's really pathetic. Tackling... something they teach in junior league football... and it seemed like NONE of the eagles could do it. And don't even get me started about dropping passes. When a pass hits you dead on in the playoffs- YOU CATCH IT. It's not like some of these balls were difficult catches. Some of the ones that were dropped hit the player right in the numbers and bounced off like the guy doesn't even have any hands to catch with.
Coaching has been equally bad. How is it you're going to go and run the ball when there's 7 minutes left in the game and you're down by two scores? Or you're not going to throw the challenge flag when a panther punt returner steps in the endzone and steps out when it was clear that he didn't have two feet in? That mistake alone cost them 12 yards and a full minute of clock time. It was so damn obvious that even the excuse that they were trying to save timeouts doesn't make any sense to me. Set up a friggin TV next to Andy and let him see the commentators go nuts about how he was out of bounds. It's not that hard.
Oh well. I'm glad I didn't invest too much effort in cheering for the eagles this season. I was edgy all the way up through the playoffs, watching here and there, waiting for the shoe to drop. Frankly I'm glad they didn't get to the Superbowl, the way they played. They would have gotten absolutely creamed.
|
|
|
| |
| Philosophical #1 |
| 01.19.04 (7:02 am) [edit] |
Ok, this post will be the first in a series of posts about my thoughts about... well... everything. How life works and what discoveries I've made trying to figure it all out. So here we go...
There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between how people think and how the world actually works. I call it the difference between conformity and change.
I was trying to figure out why it seems so hard for people to change, even when the change is good. People are creatures of habit- "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" and the like. Why is that? Conformity feels comfortable and "right" to us, while change seems foreign and uncomfortable. Some of our most basic fears are fears of the unknown where we know a change will occur and things will not stay the same as they are. Death, for example. We have laws against killing each other because deep down, we all fear death. I think most people believe that there's something beyond death- it doesn't seem to make any sense for life to exist in one plane for a little while and then become stamped out utterly. (Most of what life is is an attempt to keep on living- for example sex is a built-in mechanism to keep the circle of life going). But if there's something beyond death, what is it? Nobody really knows. Same thing with any large amount of change- we seem to naturally want to resist it. Look at how people learn something: you normally have to practice it over and over. Your mind resists it. Until you get to a point where you "learn" it, and it becomes second nature. It's like reaching a new platoe. But once you've gotten there, it becomes very hard to "unlearn" the thing you just learned, if for example you need to change it. How difficult is it to change a habit you've grooved down over many years? How many times have I driven down the wrong street because normally when I go down that street I go to a certain destination, yet this one time is an exception, and my mind still takes me as if I'm going where I always go? Even our language is an attempt to create "solidity" in chaos. We name things to attach a meaning to them so we can give them a reality which we are then able to understand.
The unfortunate thing for us is that it seems the universe is a sea of change. Change is it's nature, not conformity. The very laws of nature we discovered (Newton's laws) break down and don't make any sense at the atomic level. Every time someone think's they've discovered a "fundamental" law, someone else has discovered an exception. The very fabric of the universe is full of contridictions. A really basic one is that matter and energy are the same thing (E=MC^2). That means matter is not immovable, but dynamic- changing back and forth between mass properties and wave properties. Continuing, that means nothing really has a fixed space: the current position of something is just the most probable energy state (see quantum mechanics). Another example is weather- weather is constantly changing and shifting. Our thermodynamics teaches us that hot always flows to cold, but we never abserve absolute (unchanging) temperatures in real life. Hot and cold always seem to be revolving around each other.
What is my point in all this? Well, I'm led to believe the happiest people are the ones who are able to adapt to change. These are the people that can improve their lives in the face of adversity. When the rules around them crumble in the face of change, they are able to make new rules that serve them better. Also, an ability to change eliminates the one greatest block people have: fear. What are you able to fear if you know you can adapt to any situation life brings you? Without fear, I think people could literally do anything.
|
|
|
| |
| Short list of reasons to re-defeat Bush in 2004 |
| 01.12.04 (1:53 pm) [edit] |
1) Realistically, you can't vote for Bush. Bush lost the popular vote and so was never elected, at least not by the people. It's the first time ever we've had a president who lost the popular vote. Regardless of the Electorial Collage and the fact the US is a republic, for the presidential election, the majority should rule. Bush and republicans abused their power to curb the recount process in Florida, which convieniently was governed by his brother Jeb. The recount process was drawn out so long that the public lost interest, and so accepted the Bush appointment. Worse, there are reports that ballots were taped together and various people were denied the right to vote, all in Bush's favor. Attempts to review this misconduct after Bush took office were repeatedly shot down.
2) Hurrendous mis-management of the environment: Bush killed the decades-old Kyoto Treaty (one of the most important environmental treaties ever), the ABM treaties, and the Ban on Germ Warfare Treaty, and has been repeatedly trying to drill for oil in protected wildlife areas. His list of offenses against the environment is too long to mention. So much so that Europe threw the US off the Human Rights Commission, which is the first time that's happened in 50 years. He and Chaney are practically obessed with finding ways to please their energy-loving cronies. Even resorting to lying that the US was under an "energy crisis".
3) The economy is the worst it's been in a very long time. The national debt is over 7 trillion. Bush killed the decline in defecit spending started by Clinton and is now spending more then ever. Bush's tax cuts have done nothing but feed the greedly palms of the wealthy. Bush's Medicare law was passed with the sole purpose of bankrupting Medicare, and claims that it would provide the desperately needed perscription drug benifit to Seniors are riddled with inconsistancies. In reality, the money is once again going to the wealthy- this time the greedy perscription companies, who now have a free hand in setting any price they want for drugs.
4) Bush was criminally negligent during the 9/11 attacks. He ignored repeated warnings from security officials that Bin Laden was a threat and could use planes to attack US buildings. He ignored the first attack thinking it was an accedent even though Norad had identified the plane as hijacked. He lied about seeing the first plane crash on TV during the morning of 9/11, even though video for that plane crash wasn't discovered until several days later. Then when he was told that the second plane hit the other tower, he sat in a classroom for 20 extra minutes (!!) and did absolutely NOTHING- no address the nation, no scramble himself to safety, NOTHING. Convieniently, the president is the only person who has the power to scramble jets to intercept hijacked planes. Thus, Bush was directly responsible for at LEAST the plane hitting the Pentagon, since once again NORAD had information that the plane was hijacked. (Side note: I recently found out that several months before 9/11, the Bush administration sent a $43 million dollar gift to the Taliban as a bribe to support the war on drugs!! Can you believe that? Guess what they used that money for?)
5) Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to pass the Patriot Act, one of the most offensive acts ever passed. The Patriot Act seriously limits the rights of US citizens and creates a near facious state within the US with the amount of power given to groups like the FBI. Not only that, but there have been creditable reports that Bush is actively sought to create a "shadow government". While Bush defends this mesure as appropriate in case in the government is somehow destroyed by terrorist attack, effectively what this does is create a government of only executive branch members that would take over in a near-dictatorship should any such an "emergency" occur. Bush not only created this, but he purposely kept the creation secret from the Senate and the Judiciary. If that doesn't scare the sh!t out of you, I don't know what does.
6) Bush also used 9/11 as an excuse to execute his already-pre-planned war on Iraq, WITHOUT approval of the UN. Bush completely lied that Iraq had WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), which was his main cause for going to war. Not only does Iraq not have any WMD (nothing has ever been found), but no link was ever established between Iraq and Al Queda. Thus, for the first time in history, the US has delibrately attacked another country without being provoked. Bush lied to his own people to start a war. (I seem to remember a man named Hitler doing the exact same thing. Hitler lied that Poland attacked Germany and used that as an excuse as to why Germany should attack Poland. He did the same thing with France and England.)
7) And most seriously, the US is hated almost universally around the world, and the president continues to embarrass the US on the world stage. Bush's bullying tactics and isolationism has caused many countries to drop their support of the US. Worse, countries that were relatively neutral to the US (like Russia and China) are becoming openly hostile. Bush has actually done more to PROVOKE terrorism against US citizens by his aggressive tactics then any other president I've lived under. He reinstated the Missile Defense System, he refused to appologize when one of our spy plane's flew over China and then crashed, and he even provoked the enemy in Iraq into killing US citizens by saying "bring em on". He is nothing short of a warmonger. Worse, he is almost embarrasingly stupid in how he conducts himself. He constantly forgets important details and flubs speeches. He joked that he was a C average student. A book written about how badly he speaks and how stupid his comments are was on the number one list for several weeks. That's pretty sad. The guy just makes America look BAD.
Forget being afraid of terrorism, my worst fear is my own country. Freedoms being taken away, enemies being made, debt piling up, environment being destroyed. All getting worse every day. In conclusion, I'd like to say that it's even hard for me to come up with a good thing Bush has done. So many things are wrong that it's almost too hard to know where to start. I could say that Bush has gotten rid of Saddam, which was supported by the majority of Iraqis since he was a dictator. But at what cost? 500 some US dead, untold Iraqi citizens dead, major destablization of the region (crime and terror on the rise), and no clear scheme for re-establishing the soverenty and freedoms of the Iraqi people. Instead, I read about US troops guarding the oil fields. It just makes me sick that all the administration can think about is oil while our troops keep dying.
Please, god in heaven, please don't vote for Bush in 2004. I'm convinced that he is easily the worst president this country has ever had. I've never seen so many bad things happen in only four years.
|
|
|
| |
| Top Seven things I hate about driving |
| 01.12.04 (8:58 am) [edit] |
Driving sucks. No, seriously. The more I drive in my car, the more I hate driving. There are a few reasons for this. For one, I no longer thing driving is fun the way I did when I first learned to drive. Driving has ceased to be that wonderful thing of freedom and has instead become quite boring, especially when it's just yourself in the car. (Those of you just learning to drive: you'll find this out soon enough when you get a job and drive back and forth to work each day.) Second, I live in an extremely densely populated area (Southern NJ, near Cherry Hill). Traffic can become unbearable. And third and most important, the main reason I hate driving is because generally, people don't know how to drive. Sure, they know traffic laws and such. But they don't know how to keep traffic moving, and they are generally WAY to cautious. I mean, after you've driven a few years, you shouldn't need to come to a full stop at a Stop sign. People take the traffic laws way too literally. I'm of the opinion that since driving is so boring, driving should be about getting to your destination as fast as possible. So what drives me crazy the most are people that do things that end up slowing everyone else down. Anyway, on to the Top Seven list.
7) Construction that takes years to finish. If you live in NJ, no doubt you are completely pissed off at this point with the construction on 295. It's been a year, and 295 is still creating massive traffic jams because they're too lazy to finish the construction.
6) Traffic lights that aren't synced up. This is a simple one. All I want, is for lights that are going in a certain direction, to all go green at the same time. Two days ago, I stopped at FOUR red lights in a row on the same stretch of road, not 500-1000 ft from each other. Do you know how annoying it is to finally get through a light and immediately have to stop for ANOTHER red light?!
5) People who don't hit the gas when the light turns green. I've discovered that people don't look at the light, they look at the guy in front of them. So when the light turns green, the first guy starts to go, then the next guy gets a clue and starts to go, then the next, etc. That means, when the light turns green, everybody doesn't start to go. You wait like 20-30 seconds before anybody goes, which is completely retarded. The worst thing is when you miss the light because it took so long for you to start to go that you barely moved at all.
4) People who leave 10 car stopping distances, both when at speed and even when going along in a 10 MPH traffic jam. People: stopping distances should not be that necessary. If you drive at all, you should be alert at all times. That means, you should be able to stop whenever you need to, without a massively large stopping distance. What's worse is when people do this in a traffic jam. YOU DO NOT NEED STOPPING DISTANCE IN A TRAFFIC JAM. If anything, the right lane should have a single car's worth of space so that merging cars can get in. Other then that, all you are doing is making it harder for cars to get on the road because all the space is being taken up by people with huge stopping distance.
3) People who slow down for traffic jams. (I would love to get a report on why traffic jams occur.) There is no reason in the world why people shouldn't be able to move at a high speed even when there's lots of cars on the road. Either people give too much stopping distance (see above), or they think they always have to slow down. In fact, I think there are a few key things which cause traffic jams (see below). People should avoid these.
2) People who don't know how to merge. This is the MAJOR reason for traffic jams that I have seen. People have massive problems merging, and it slows everyone down while they figure out how to do it. (How to merge should be taught in driving school). Number one, people refuse to let each other in. Hey dumbass, the person next to you has to merge. If they don't merge, they will go off the friggin road. So don't be an asshole: let people merge. IMHO, the whole key to merging is to make it such that people don't have to slow down while merging. So the first trick is to mandate that people do a 1-1 merge: first one car merges, a car goes, then another car merges, etc. Second, is to put a sign on the road that says "MERGE HERE". Disregarding the assholes who won't let in mergers, normal people have a problem where then don't know when exactly they should merge. Some slow down and try to force their way into the legions of assholes who won't let them merge. Others speed up and try to merge at the very last possible time. Both are wrong: there should be a spot marked on the road where merging MUST occur. This will act as a guideline for the one lane to open up car-length gaps and for the other lane to initiate merging. A simple way to enforce this is to have a policeman stand at a barrier and ticket people who don't follow the 1-1 procedure.
1) And the number one thing I hate about driving is: People who slow down to watch things on the side of the road. Out of all the things people do while driving, this one pisses me off the most. I have (no lie) seen people slow traffic down to a 10 MPH crawl, just to look at a few cops pulled over on the side of road flashing their lights. It wasn't even an accident, it was just several cops who had pulled over a car. Another time, I watch people create a traffic jam as they attempted to watch an accident that had happened on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD. Unfuckingbelievable. Maybe I just don't understand the Jerry Springer-loving idiots that seem to make up 95% of the population. But me, I just want to get to work. Who CARES that there was an accident? You can't do anything about it: what happened, happened. It's not like you can do anything. I don't see any of you pulling over to the side of the road to help. No. All you are doing is being fucking nosy. To that I say, can't you just wait until you get home and watch it on the 5 o'clock news?! You're completely screwing over the people behind you who want to get somewhere. Please, PLEASE, if you're reading this weblog, and you see something flashing out on the road but not obstructing traffic, IGNORE IT. CONTINUE DRIVING. If you don't, and I find you, be aware that I'm probably going to rip off your balls and shove them down your throat. You deserve no less.
|
|
|
| |
| Apple and premium price |
| 01.07.04 (10:47 am) [edit] |
A lot of points have been made that it's perfectly ok for Apple to overcharge as much as they do. The main arguments are:
1) Apple's stuff is better designed, so is worth paying more. (This argument is about mac stuff being less costly because it "just works": an attitude that is applied to the rest of apple's products.)
2) Apple's "style" (i.e. their brand) makes them worth paying more. Apple is the elite of the computer industry. Like comparing a BMW to a Ford.
3) Apple can't make things for free.
There are some serious flaws with these statements, so I'm going to break them down. A lot of this has to do with the particular nature of apple and the almost fanatical support customers give them.
1) Apple's "better" design comes from an attitude about the "apple way", which mean innovation. Apple has notoriously held out for innovation, even whne it might have not been the best way to handle a design. While most of the industry copies each other's designs (me-too-ness of for example, Dell), Apple typically puts a lot of effort into being "different". This is one reason why people love apple so much. It takes personal risk to be willing to try something new in an attempt to make things better for people.
However, the problem comes when people subbornly insist apple is innovative even when what apple does something wrong. For one, "different" is not always "better". A perfect example is Apple's one button mouse that they sell with all macs. When it came out, it was very innovative: it was optical, slick looking, and the whole surface was the button (no other mouse has this feature). Yet it still has only one mouse button. For people who have used multibutton mice, and enjoy their feature set, the design is unacceptable. Even BACKWARD. So no, apple is not always better designed. A properly designed product combines innovation with the best possible feature set at a reasonable price. While apple excels at innovation, they often fail on the other two accounts.
Another problem is that people generalize that the quality of mac stuff is always better. This is not true (beware of the word ALWAYS). While apple typically makes their designs sexy, many times I've seen that the guts of the product is not up to par. For example, I own a top-of-the-line G4 that was designed without a audio-out port and with an extremely slow Superdrive that makes burning disks a pain. It also came with a fairly slow video card. So while apple hits home runs sometimes (the first firewire computers, etc.) they have just as many failures with their designs (one-button mouse).
2) This one is all about perception. Apple is currently very good at designing the "look" for all their products. Yet as I've said, appearances can sometimes be deceiving. Despite the high quality of apple's design, the fact is that computers are disposable commodities. You get about three years out of a computer before it needs to be thrown out or at least upgraded. Following the car analogy, BMWs also depreciate, but at a much slower pace then any computer. Also unlike computers, old cars get to certain point where they are so old they become "classics". I.E. the value for them goes up again. This is nowhere near the case for computers. REALLY old computers might have a bit of value to a collector, but it's much more rare. Another point is that that you typically don't "show off" your computer the way you can with a car. A BMW indicates status because of the brand. Mac's are a bit different- they sit in your house. Unless friends come over and see your computer, you don't gain the same status advantage of having a stylish mac (except that it looks good to YOU.) Also, it's much more important for a computer to perform then the look of it's exterior, because of the nature of what it does. If an old classic car makes funny sounds, it's viewed as a good thing because it's "classic". Whereas with an old computer typically can't perform as well as a new one (this is debatable depending upon the computer's application). And finally, apple's brand is only just immerging. While the computer industry praises apple for it's innovation, the average person on the street barely knows anything about macs. Let alone has ever used one. Everyone knows the BMWs are highly valuable, but the same is not true for macs. Many people MUCH perfer PCs for a number of reasons: they can get the software they want, they're compatable with other people, they can typically get cheaper pricing for the same quality, and the list goes on. It's not true that if X person had enough money, they would immediately buy a mac. For some it's even the exact opposite: macs have been viewed as kiddie toys- underpowered. And for many times in the mac's history, the mac WAS underpowered for the same price as you could get on the PC side.
3) This is my favorite one. Nothing is for free- if you want something you have to pay for it. Quite frankly, this is a very silly justification for apple overpricing. First of all, it assumes the other person is stupid and doesn't know that things cost money to make. Second, the short answer is that if the product is of a certain value, people will most certainly pay for it. Nobody goes around complaining that they can't afford a BMW. Why is that? Because they know that a BMW is truely a better car then other onces out there. Apple however, must constantly be compared to what is going on in the PC side, which products have similar components to apple's, yet are typically cheaper.
The most important thing going on here is the frustration that apple doesn't find price points which can appeal to the majority of people who want to use their products. There is a need to support the mac platform when faced with the reality of 5% marketshare and when the industry has been crushed by microsoft and cheap me-too type products. There's the fear that if apple doesn't get it right, nobody will. And that drives the frustration when apple can't meet customer price scales. Nobody wants to see apple go out of business, but nobody can afford apple's pricing. Instead of accusing others of not supporting apple, people need to admit when apple screws up. Apple isn't perfect, nor will they ever be.
|
|
|
| |
| Apple and MWSF '03 |
| 01.06.04 (1:00 pm) [edit] |
Steve Jobs just finished his keynote. The new iLife is impressive, and I think it's a good value considering you get a brand new app for the same amount of money as the previous version. (I didn't buy it, because I didn't care about iDVD.) FCP 2 doesn't really interest me, but it sould like a good upgrade. But I'm highly disappointed with the iPod mini and the lack of change to the existing iPod line. First of all, at $250, the iPod mini is way too expensive. The whole purpose of coming out with an iPod mini is so apple can challenge the cheaper mp3 players out there. But it seems to me that the old apple came out of the woodworks and stopped the mini from being a reasonable price.
Apple keeps insisting that everything about their design is better, thus they should be able to charge more for it then everybody else. However, except for the sexy look of apple's hardware, I beg to differ that apple is always ahead of the competition. Other mp3 players out there have a ton more features then iPods already: voice recording, radio tuner, equalizer, the list goes on. Some even have picture and movie viewing capability. Apple NEEDS these things in the iPod. Otherwise, it's going to come back to what it always has with mac stuff: overpriced sexyness vs the other guy's better feature set. I just hope that apple get's with it before people wake up and go for the Dell mp3 player with the better features for less money. That's killed apple in the past.
|
|
|
| |
| Welcome to my blog |
| 01.06.04 (11:44 am) [edit] |
Hello there. What the ultimate purpose of this blog will be yet, I'm not sure. I decided to start a blog mainly to get down my ideas on things, have a place to store them, collect them into topics to further expand on them, and see what sort of feedback I get. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but never got around to doing it. You'll discover quickly that I love ideas- I read a lot, and I just love getting cought up in a subject.
For a while, my main source of inspiration was the Matrix movies. While some are disappointed by the way the trilogy came out (including myself), I continue to be completely dumbfounded by the number and richness of the ideas the matrix movies put forth. Imagine merging the worlds of physics, mathematics, religion, psychology, nature, and myth all together. It's like taking the sum total of human knowledge, putting into a pot, mixing it around, and defining the human condition. I'll expand more on this later, but for much of last year I was conviced that the matrix movies discovered something truely amazing about who we are and what the purpose of life is.
More later.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
