What I’m Blogging

There’s a saying in the IT world, “The install expands to fill all available time” and my recent work experience bears evidence to the truth of the maxim. My particular install is absorbing all time around it. I’m expecting a call any moment from some institute of advanced quantum physics as there must be a rip in the space time continuum as a result.

…some ten days have passed by in the process…

It would seem to be a simple thing; install server, load OS, load application. It isn’t. The open source version of the application works on one OS, but the released version of the application doesn’t. Reboot, reformat repeat… several times.

You fiddle with it, you tweak it, and you finally get the damn thing running. It’s almost a shame to let the users at it, because you know they are just going to break it. But oh well what can one do? Then you look up from your desk, and realize that some ten days have passed by in the process. Bloody hell! How did that happen?

Time to reintegrate into what ever is left of my life…

It’s the birthday of Aldous Huxley, born in Surrey, England (1894). Huxley’s own grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was one of the great scientists of the previous century, a man who helped popularize Darwin’s theories of evolution. Huxley’s grandfather is believed to be the man who coined the word “agnostic,” and he argued that all areas of knowledge would one day come to be understood through science.

…An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex…

Huxley considered becoming a scientist himself, but when he was seventeen years old, he came down with a disease of the eyes, which rendered him almost blind. He learned to read Braille and said he loved it because he could read in bed without getting his hands cold. But since most of his schoolbooks had never been translated into Braille, he had to finish his education by reading everything with a giant magnifying glass. Despite that, his friends all agreed that he was the best-read guy they knew.

His first successful novel was Point Counter Point (1928), about a group of artists and intellectuals who don’t realize that one of the men in their company is a budding fascist revolutionary. Point Counter Point was Huxley’s first best-seller, and since it had been so ambitious a book, Huxley decided that his next book would be something light. He had been reading some H.G. Wells, and thought it might be fun to try to write some science fiction.

The result was Brave New World (1932), about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered. It was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality.

Aldous Huxley said, “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

Some people are like Slinkies . . . not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.

received by email, author unknown

The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world : small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. - Elrond - The Lord of the Rings - Book II Chapter 2 by J.R.R. Tolkien.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore RooseveltCitizenship in a Republic,Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910