Windows 7 and Thoughts on Brand Affinity

Friday night and here I am in front of the computer screen yet again, in an attempt to get back on track with my blogging schedule. Unfortunately, I think that my brain recognizes that this is not a usual time that I depend on it for productivity and creativity, as my thoughts are constantly wandering away from anything that might resemble an interesting topic.

But! I shall endeavor to press on without the use of my brain. We'll see how this goes.

I decided to make the jump to Windows 7 today. I actually qualified for a free upgrade when I bought the new computer a month or so ago, but I was hesitant to actually make the decision to commit. I know, I know, Vista is a dark and wicked taskmaster, I agree completely, but I think in the back of my mind, there was this subconscious fear that, just as the transition from XP to Vista was a sharp downgrade, I worried that Windows 7 would somehow be even worse.

Which reminds me, I really still do need to get my laptop fixed. I miss having it.

But so far, the word on Windows 7 seems to be that it's good, although admittedly, anything would be better than Vista at this point. I kept telling myself that I'd grow to tolerate it, it being Vista, I mean, and even now, after a month, I find that it grates my nerves and just refuses to do things the way I would like.

It always bothers me that it's impossible for me to complain about something like this without somebody mentioning that "well, you could get a Mac and then you wouldn't have to deal with it." And it's like, you know... I understand that people like Macs and that they're good computers. And I'm sure they're useful when it comes to art design or video editing or something. But to be perfectly honest, I hate being told to get a Mac, because I don't like them. I don't get them, I don't get the feeling, I don't sync with the aesthetic. I used a Mac when I was in journalism, I've used them several times since then, and every single time, I just feel off. Out of place. Disconnected.

It's like looking at a painting that's in a style you don't care for by an artist you don't like. Yeah, it's still art, but there's no connection for me, no affinity.

So I stick with the PC, because that's what I know, that's what I like, it's what's comfortable for me. And I bristle every time I'm told to get a Mac. Because to me, people like Apple for the brand, which is fine, because there's a certain satisfaction in feeling affinity for a particular brand. But I don't know whether it's because I just being an outsider in the tech world (I have a Zune, after all) or what, but I just don't feel the allure of that brand name.

And speaking of the Zune, that's one product that I'm actually very happy with and I'm proud to say that I'm a fan of, not because I feel loyalty to the brand, but because I think it's a great device that's severely under-appreciated.

Topic for another day, perhaps.

Death, Graduation, and Lyrics

It is always extremely difficult to think of something to write about when all you have in your head is song lyrics.

It's registration week for me. I say for me because I have no idea anymore how registration is supposed to go, or who goes when, or in what order. I mention to a friend that I'm having trouble getting a class I want and find out his registration was two weeks ago, or it's next month, or something. So who knows.

It's really hard to believe that I'm finally coming down to the end of my University career. I mean, I've known for a while that at some point, I would have more semesters behind me than ahead of me, but I was never really cognizant of the fact until I was looking at my SAPR and realized that "some day" has become "a year from now." Maybe even sooner, if I decided to do something crazily motivated like take a winter session.

I can't help but think about what life is going to be like when class is over. I have to admit, I'm pretty intimidated by the fact; it's like all the waiting I've done, all the preparation, all the build-up has reached its crescendo, and now it's like "Go! Get out into the world! Find your destiny!"

Of course, I realize that it's not exactly the way my thoughts imagine life after college to be. There won't be a referee firing off a shot or an announcer shouting "and they're off!" Maybe that would be the case if I had a different major, instead of Humanities. But it still feels like the time is coming to a close, that I'm going to need to soon start thinking, seriously, about what I want for life. Where I want to be, what I want to do. Which is not to say that I've never thought of those things in the past few years, but rather that I always thought of them only in the abstract, things that were hazy and obscured by the fog of "some day."

Maybe I'll travel first. That's something I really want to do.

Because I'm thinking about life and goals and time, I find myself drawn back to a comment my philosophy instructor made in class on Tuesday. I made a point about how the fact that the Earth is fated to die (which it is) seems like a great evil from which no good could possibly justify it, and he responded: "Is death so horrible that life is not worth living?"

It's stuck with me. Mortality is something that we, especially at this age, have a hard time really grasping. There is a difference between knowing something, after all, and knowing, in your heart and mind and believing it. We know we're going to all die, that every single person will die, and yet, I don't think we really know that about ourselves.

And it seems horribly wrong to think that life will end, which is why we cling to the hope of an afterlife, that somehow, our existence will continue on after our bodies have succumbed to the frailty of mortality. Is it greedy, to want more? To feel that no matter how much life is allotted to us, that it isn't enough? If you were given the choice of what age to live to, what would you pick? How many years would it be before you decide "that is enough. I have had enough of life now."

It's a strange paradox for me, given that I consider immortality to be the worst possible fate imaginable, the ultimate prison, to have one's soul or consciousness or whatever bound forever to flesh. And yet, I don't know at what point I can see myself saying "I'm ready. I've had enough."

And I know that there are people who do reach that stage, especially if death is a relief from suffering. Or at least, they think they reach that stage, a point where the quality of life is less than what good may come of a peaceful death.

I don't know what any of this means, but it's what's on my mind at the moment. Well, that and the lyrics to a Johnathan Coulton song. So there you go.

Devoid of Focus or Reason

You'll have to forgive me if I sound a trifle... angry, this evening. Take a glance over at the twitter feed on the right side of the screen if you're curious to know why. In the meantime (while I'm waiting for the site I need to load!) I decided it was a good time to update the ol' blog.

I mean, Jesus, really? The site's been loading for 23 minutes? This isn't 1996! I'm not trying to access somebody's personal home page with a million pictures on a 56k dial-up. Technology has moved on.

For some reason, I'm thinking about my desk. It's really messy at the moment, although it's usually always messy. Currently, though, there are no less than 15 assorted bottles, all empty, one wallet (it's mine), four different documents for a class, an old electric bill, my Nintendo DS, a remote control, a USB headset, a plate, a book about climbing Mount Everest, a digital camera, and I think that's a Comcast bill. I'm not sure. It's under a stack of bottles.

It's always been interesting to me how creative people relate to their workspace. Some of us treat our desks as sacred temples and take great care to keep them pristine, organized, clean and efficient; the idea of working in a cluttered, chaotic environment is anathema. Unthinkable! I'm not one of those people (obviously), so I'm not really certain what makes a person feel that way. I'd imagine an OCD thing?

For the rest of us, though, we don't care about the fact that the desk is messy. If anything, the messy desk is the mark of a well-used desk. It's the kind of statement that says "I don't have time to worry about this mundane shit, I'm working!" That's a bold statement, friends! People should be impressed by our dedication to our craft, not repulsed!

It's probably wishful thinking, at best; I very much doubt that anybody would look at a desk like mine and be impressed. Disgusted, certainly, indifferent, most likely, but impressed?

Since tonight seems to be rambling, unfocused blog night, I'll just move on to the next thought in my head. Do you ever get nostalgic for the "old Internet?" I remember what it was like when I first started logging on, back in, oh, 1998 or so. Now, I'm sure there are nerds out there who would scoff at the idea of 98 being the "good old days of the Internet." They might mention things like Usenet or a BBS. Well, screw those people. 98 was the old days for me, it was my first experience with cyberspace.

I'm not saying it was better. It wasn't. MySpace didn't exist, true, but you had instead a thousand different Geocities, Angelfire and Fortune City websites that were even worse, if you can imagine such a thing. Broken HTML tags, scrolling text, animated GIFs: such things make today's abominable teenage MySpace page, with its irritating music and tiled background that obscures the text look almost palatable!

It was weird before things like Wikipedia, though. Everything felt different, and I'm sure a lot of that was an internal reaction, because I was the newbie, coming into this new realm for the first time. I can still remember the very first time I ever posted on a message board. Which, of course, means I can also remember the first time I was flamed, which would be my first introduction to the fact that the anonymity and audience inherent to the Internet means that most people will be dicks.

Ah well.

Oh, look, the website finished loading while I was typing. How quaint.

This May Hurt Your Brain

Back once again into the breach. The, um, blog breach, I guess? I have no idea. What shall we talk about tonight, my dear readers? I know that there are a few out there, given that comments have shown up here and there (!) along with profile views, so clearly somebody is out there listening to me ramble. At the very least, there's a crawler robot that comb the nascent Interwebs for search engine, or something.

I think that tonight, we're going to return to some philosophy for a moment, because a question was posed to me today that really froze my thoughts for a while as I pondered it out.

Let me outline a scenario for you: Things exist. I'm a thing. I exist. I was caused by my parents; the "reason" I exist is because they created me (I'm not going to think about that too closely, though.) But do all things have to have a reason for existing? Could something exist for no reason at all?

If you give this question some thought, you'll find that it's both simple and also absolutely devilish in how tricky it is.

On the surface, it seems that the answer is yes, absolutely, things that exist have a reason for existing, even if we don't know what that reason is. And logically, it seems like an existing thing needs a reason for existing, because if it didn't have a reason to exist, why would it? We can imagine non-existence; it's not hard to imagine a reality in which nothing exists, because there was never a reason for existence to occur. That's just an inherent truth in the definition of non-existence, which you'll either accept or deny based on whether you think that "nothing" can occur in reality. Some people don't buy that, or so I've heard.

So, let's try to imagine a world in which things exist for no reason. What does that mean? A guy named Richard Taylor has a scenario in which you imagine finding, in a perfectly normal forest, a large sphere that's as tall as you, translucent; clearly not something that would occur naturally. Your immediate reaction is to ask yourself how such a ball could come to be here. Perhaps it was man-made? Space aliens, perhaps? Some new kind of crystalline formation, previously unknown to science?

You most likely wouldn't automatically assume that the ball has no reason for being there. Surely someone or something caused it to be there; to say that the ball has no reason for being in that forest causes one to ask why there would be such a ball at all? Why wouldn't there just be a normal forest instead? That just doesn't seem logical, and yet, it's very tough to explain exactly why that is the case.

What's become particularly troublesome for me is when I've tried to wrap my mind around the idea of something coming into existence for no reason. Let's say, for instance, that the singularity that existed prior to the Big Bang, since the Big Bang defined all the known laws of the Universe (so far as we can tell) just popped into reality for no reason. Although would there even be a reality at that point, since there was no time or space? Okay, bad example. Let's go back to the ball in the forest.

Let's say the ball just popped into existence one day. Immediately, I have to ask myself: how would that have occurred? The matter that composes it would have had to come from something; it's one of the laws of thermodynamics that matter cannot be created or destroyed (at least in a closed system, as far as I can tell.) Even if the ball spontaneously appeared, something would have had to cause that spontaneously event. The really crazy thing is that shit like this actually does happen all the way down at the quantum level.

The quantum level, if you're not a huge nerd like me who spends his time thinking about this stuff, is basically the closest science has ever come to proven that magic exists. Things at the quantum level do weird things like appear for what's apparently no reason at all, or else exist in two places at once, or become altered by the very fact that they're being observed (Schrodinger's Cat.) Can you imagine that? Imagine changing something not because you poked it, or pushed it, or even spoke to it, or interacted with it in any way other than by merely looking at it. Doesn't make sense.

Back to my point.

So, we've got the quantum level, where things seem to happen for what is (apparently) no reason, or at least, no reason that we can figure out yet. It's entirely possible that people do have theories for the behavior for quantum particles, but those theories probably involve a lot of math, and well, there's a reason I'm a goddamn Creative Writing major even though I think this science stuff is cool: I just do not freaking understand how any of it is calculated.

Maybe quantum existence proves that things can happen for no reason! But then why do they only happen at the quantum level? Why don't people just spontaneously pop into existence? Or it is possible that there is an explanation for the quantum state, we just haven't figured it out yet. And even without that being the case, how exactly does something start existing without having a reason to do so?

If you're still reading along at home at this point, you're either extremely interested in this type of philosophical pondering, or you skimmed all the way to the end. Either way, thank you, although I don't have any answers to offer. Only more questions.

But that's part of the fun, I think. Asking questions, wondering why things are. It's why this philosophy stuff fascinates me so much, especially since it fascinates me in a way that probably won't affect the outcome of my life. It's not wondering for the sake of a better job, or to make life better; it's wondering for its own sake. To me, that's awesome.

Anticipation

I like how the weekend always completely kills my blog writing schedule. All during the week, I'm making sure that I'm posting every day, being on top of things, and then all of a sudden, Thursday rolls around and I'm like "sweet, tomorrow's Friday," and for some reason, that sends a signal to my brain that it's okay to turn off, even though it's really not, since I still should be doing work on Thursday and Friday. And inevitably, the "brain shutdown state" persists until Sunday night rolls around and I realize that I'm going to fall behind if I don't write something, so I make sure to get back on task and keep up with my consistency, while telling myself not to let it happen in the future, even though it's happened almost every week for the past month.

What can I say, it's a vicious cycle.

At the moment, I'm thinking about the fact that this is the last week in October, which means that it's very nearly November, which means that it's time, once again, for NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Basically, the goal is to write an entire novel, 60,000 words (or so, I can't quite remember what the exact number is) in 30 days. It sounds totally crazy, but the idea is that by having such a crazy pace, you can't stop to think about whether or not what you're writing is any good, you just have to keep writing, writing, writing! And at the end of it, you'll have learned a lot about making a good writing schedule and overcoming hangups and other cool things. And you'll have a manuscript completed, albeit of dubious quality.

I think that the entire concept is a really cool idea, but I guess the problem I've had in the past is that November really is a bad month for this kind of project, in my opinion. It's a really busy time for students, who are feeling the crunch as the semester draws ever closer to its conclusion. If you work retail, you're feeling the oncoming burn of holiday hours, as we begin the long crawl into the frenzy that is the holiday shopping season. No matter who you are, November is a busy month.

I really do think that something early or mid-summer would be better for this kind of endeavor, because really, who has things going on in June, unless you're taking a vacation?

Regardless, I'll give it a shot this year; as I said, I think it's a cool idea and I had a really good time with it last year. I actually got pretty far in the story, had something like two solid weeks of working on my project until, rather ironically, I went to a convention to receive an award for a short story I'd written, and spending the whole weekend at the con totally killed my writing schedule, so that by the time I thought about the work again, I was hopelessly behind.

I've got a few ideas kicking around in my head about what I want to write about, although nothing too solid. I found that if I tried to prepare some notes or outlines before I began, I ended up straying too far away from the goal about quantity over quality which slowed me down. So this time around, I'm going to think about what I went to do, ferment some ideas, and hopefully hit the ground running on November 1st. I don't quite know how this'll go since I still have my commitment to this blog; my hope is that by working on a novel again, I'll have more thoughts and insight about writing to reflect on in this space. But no matter how you look at it, this is going to be an ambitious undertaking.

I'm excited, though, if only that it's been a while since I worked on my fiction and I'm very interested to get back to that, given that it's what I'm particularly passionate about.