The Ambivalent One

I'm getting tired of reading about the "controversy" of same sex marriages. Although I'm obviously contributing to it here. In every article I read marriage is referred to as an institution. The pertinent definition of the word is :"A custom, practice, relationship, or behavioral pattern of importance in the life of a community or society". Seems pretty accurate. My problem is that it's always implied that marriage is some sort of unchangeable rock. How can our entire society change and yet this one thing must remain static? Divorce was for the longest time a violation of the "institution of marriage" was it not?

In a time where political correctness, equal rights and non-discrimination are supposed to be at the forefront it seems contradictory to me that same sex marriages would be banned. Of course I'm mainly speaking about the current battle going on in the U.S. Groups in Canada are also mobilizing their hate fuelled armies.

Two people who love each other should be afforded the same rights. Fine, same sex marriages offends the delicate and closed minded sensibilities of the church. Then I think that the church should ban same sex marriages. The government certainly doesn't have the right to deny the people their desire to be legally bound to each other. The church isn't law anymore. Church and state are supposed to be separate. How can anyone deny the rights of the individual(s)? Have past battles been forgotten? I can't understand why there hasn't been a massive groundswell of support for gay and lesbian couples. Shouldn't every group that has fought against discrimination be joining in? That's another problem I have with society as a whole (not the individual). Individually we are all intelligent and motivated. As a whole we are forgetful and lazy. Once one battle against hate is won we forget it. More hate comes along and we don't recognize it. The fight starts over. We don't learn. Our society has A.D.D.

You may or may not agree with me. I'm a straight guy. To me marriage isn't about religion. It's a tangible gesture of love and devotion. However I think people who love each other are "married" long before the law recognizes this. Long before you buy your license from the government.

What do you think?

Some of you may know that I won a free PolyGFX case skin on-line awhile back. Well I finally got it and applied it. Looks pretty damn sweet and it was easy to install. It's thick high quality vinyl. I don't know how they printed it but it's VERY good. When I was done I streched one of the scrap pieces and the image didn't crack until I had stretched it to twice the original length.Now when you look at these pics I realize that the white front pane looks like poop... well I will be painting it black with car paint at some point... so try to ignore the GLARING white front panel...

Windowed side
Back side

You can find PolyGFX at the following page: polygfx.com/

I was extremely impressed with what I got. It came with the applicator (squeeze out air bubbles) and a poster sized installation guide with pictures. When I was done there were no air bubbles under the vinyl because of the way they applied the adhesive to the back side. SO! If painting your case is something you are considering a case skin is a nice alternative that will add some flash to your modded case. As a side note they also offer appliance skins. That's right, you can get a giant pretty vinyl image or design to cover you washer and dryer with! Fuck I'm a geek.

There is a looming threat of a potential post secondary teacher strike. Now, the teacher for my course is apparently not part of the teacher's union but I've been told they might possibly lock the school. It's just my luck. I finally get off my ass to go to school and this happens. Am I selfish? I don't think so. I'm just tired of teacher strikes. You can set your watch by it.

One of the sticking points is salary of course. The union is looking for a 4.7 percent increase. Obviously there's more to it. As I read through articles on-line I see that they want an improved "formal workload formula", teachers want to be able to choose evaluation style (I just don't like the sound of that... Makes you think evaluation would be open to individual educators' interpretation) and classroom size. I can't argue with classroom size at all. Full time courses are usually overloaded. From what I hear anyways. The good news is that both sides agree on one thing. The quality of education for the students. As annoyed as I may be I can still understand some of the reasons that teachers may need to strike. I only have a problem with the salary increase. They anticipated a 2 percent increase from the province. They just want more. In a time where almost everyone is hurting financially it's going to be hard for them to garner sympathy from the public. To me 2 or 3 percent seems reasonable, 4.7 percent is a little too much as far as I'm concerned.

On February the 17th members of the academic union (OPSEU) voted to support a strike that will begin March 3rd if a settlement is not reached. The mediator has called both parties back to the table on March 1st and 2nd in an effort to reach a settlement. Maybe I'm a pessimist but I can't see them reaching an agreement.

This probably doesn't affect most of you but I just found it interesting that there is very little media coverage on this topic. I only found out about this 5 days ago. I was reading the college paper before class yesterday and it would seem that most of the students are largely unaware. Right now all we get to hear about is the latest scandal from the liberal party and The Right Honourable Paul Martin. Does the lack of coverage speak about how we view these strikes? Are they so commonplace now that no one wants to hear about it anymore?

Sadly I actually had a hard time finding articles that had facts instead of opinions.

Articles I read that had the most information:
http://www.uoit.ca
http://www.thepioneer.com

I'm at school as I write this. Our teacher has an odd talent for an educator. He can take something that is interesting and turn it into something very boring. As I look to my left I see Dom looking at various webpages. I find myself zoning out while looking at the course material as he gives his lecture on MAC rules and collision detection/backoff. Do dry erase markers taste as good as they smell? I wonder if it's possible to wear out a dry erase whiteboard... I wonder if the teacher could catch me if I just decided to stand up and steal the colour projector. Focus Sean. Focus. "In the version of Ethernet that was developed by DIX prior to the adoption of the IEEE 802.3 version of Ethernet, the Preamble and Start Frame Delimiter (SFD) were combined into a single field, though the binary pattern was identical. The field labeled Length/Type..." He drones to a half comatose class. Currently the people walking by in the hallway are more interesting. I wonder if that person knows their hair sucks... maybe I should go tell them... NO!I need to learn!!! Collision detection is of the utmost importance!

Anyways. You know that story I told you guys I was working on? I scrapped it and I'm starting over. It turned in to an auto-biography. I'm certain none of you give a shit about how tired I am and how it's turning me in to a super retard. I guess I could use super-retard fuelled antics as material for my blog.

I'm going to go back to the epic struggle to maintain focus now.

The Linux gods must be trying to tell me something.

Reading this months issue of Maximum PC I came across an article: “How to safely install Linux on your PC.” I am a computer geek and have been considering installing Linux for a long time so I was like, yeah… Why not? This article explains how to install Mandrake 9.2 and the screen shots are pretty! Hoping on to the web I download the distro. Four burned CDs later I’m ready to start. The instructions detail how simple it is to do a multi-OS install using the built in OS loader.

After having prepared an entire hard drive to accommodate the new OS I began the installation. It was completely painless! All I have to do now is reboot and choose to load Linux from the LILO boot loader… Where’s LILO? It just went right in to Windows. What the hell? Great. Oh well, I’ll just try again tomorrow.

At work I mention this to one of the known Linux geeks at work. Just like every other Linux user I’ve ever spoken to he suggests using a different distro. I’ve decided to use Mandrake. I don’t have a particularly good reason. I just read about it and I’m stubborn. If they all had their way I would have seven or eight different versions of it downloaded by now. Screw that.

Arriving home I decide to use some of the spare parts and to cannibalize a few from my computer to build a dedicated machine to run it on. I get about half way through the installation before my screen goes blank. Awesome. I restart the computer and I get garbled crap. My video card is toast. That’s ok, it was old anyways. All I want to do is install Linux!

The next morning at work I ask anyone if they have a spare video card I could buy. Explaining why I inadvertently touched off a riot. Eight Linux users got into a brawl over which version they use. “DEBIAN ALL THE WAY HOMOS” screamed a red faced Marco as he used one of the more gangly geeks to beat down the others. “SUSE RULES BITCHES” bellowed another from a different isle, safely out of the reach of Marco. I kept trying to explain what I needed but I was no longer part of the exchange. N00bs apparently get excluded from this type of thing. I’m not “l337” enough I suppose. I decided to just go buy a used card. Less bloodshed.

Having paid fifteen dollars for a used card I went home and installed it. Linux loaded without issue. It was great. I found myself sitting there looking at the KDE desktop thinking “Ok… what now”. I went through all that crap and I have no idea what to do now. Where do I start? Why did I want Linux again?

I’m having difficulty fighting my impulses lately. If you know me you know that I tend to speak my thoughts. As of late I not only say what I’m thinking I act on urges. Leaning against a divider at work I’m chatting with a couple of people. Jason arrives and joins in the conversation. I don’t remember what we were talking about. It’s not important… As we are talking I notice he has a cup of coffee in his hand. It has me captivated. The conversation fades to the background. That cup. I want to knock it out of his hand… I twitch towards him. Realizing what I was about to do I look up and he had noticed. “Were you about to hit my coffee out of my hand?” He asks. I admit it to him. The urge was there. He says he saw me twitch.

Later that day I’m sitting at my desk chatting with two customers. Mike comes up and he’s talking to me but I don’t really hear him. All I can see is the quarters he has in his hand. He’s rubbing them together and all I can hear is the sound of metal rubbing against metal. Mesmerized… Raising my hand I reach out and smack the money out of his grasp. It’s like he was trying to steal my soul and my sub-conscious mind reacted to save me.

These two things are nothing big but there are incidences where I have had to walk away for fear of saying things. Other times I will just give complete strangers compliments out of the blue because I’ve either noticed they are attractive or they have an item of clothing or some sort of gadget that I think is cool. I’m not exactly a shy person but it seems lately that I’m more forward. I think it’s a good thing. No one has slapped me or bagged me yet. Almost always a good sign.

Stay tuned. I have a short story in the works.

I find myself a victim of the frustration the customers I deal with on a daily basis must surely feel. We had a power outage 3 days ago that knocked all of Orléans offline. Everyone came back up with the exception of me. That’s why you haven’t been able to access my site. We had two techs out in the last two days. Three cable modems later we are back online. I found myself stockpiling on internet before leaving work so I would have news and funny sites in my head later on as I sat in front of my computer pretending that it wasn’t useless to me without internet access. I was forced to face reality when I needed to review some course material. I learned that you can’t just make stuff up in your head and hope that it’s accurate. Dom and I got home after class and we went through the module test. This is where I discovered that the stuff I made up in my head wasn’t right. Thankfully he did the test first so when I followed I got 100%... he didn’t. It’s good to learn from mistakes. Dom learned too. Next time I go first.

I know... six days and this is all I have to say. Well it's late and I'm tired. I'm writing something and it may be posted later today. No promises. I think I might sleep the whole day away before going to class.