AllCdnboy's Blog - Day's of a Geek

As un-manly as it is to read a book like this I still found it very interesting ... and very true. I actually read this book about a year ago, but every time I get into an argument with a women, that book comes to the top of my mind.

Women are an entirely different species from us Men ... and rightly the reverse. The way our brains process things and, most obviously, look at arguements are 180 degrees from each other.

The basics: men try to reason around arguments and women try to feel ... yes, that is a very heavy stereotype, but more true than not.

Women expect us to understand when something is wrong, and when asked, they say nothing when it really is something. We're just supposed to get it! And, regardless if it is ever settled, it gets filed away in the infamous filing cabinet.

On the reverse, ask a man, and if he says nothing it is nothing. Or if it is really something, it is small enough that we will get over it without discussing it ... it won't make it to a filing cabinet ... it will be burned with seconds of "getting over it".

Women have this need to be "validated". To do this, we just have to protend to understand their feelings ... problem is, OUR logic says that their feelings don't make any sense. Logic won't allow us to validate them if there is no understanding of why they need to be validated ... obviously a bit of a sticking point.

These things called "feelings" make clouded judgements ... from our perspective. They will look at something / someone and just feel that something isn't right ... or try to put themselves in that persons shoes and try to figure out how they feel ... projecting their own emotions ... screw any facts / situations that are similar.

Men - something doesn't feel right. Lets analyze it. Look at similar situations and remove all emotional attachment ... get right down to the facts and way the odds.

Here's a funny example of how hard it is for us to get away from who we are:

Give this book to a women, and she will read it thoroughly and then try to apply it ... and try to understand us ... to do that, she will often ask questions. However, problem there is that we don't like these questions (as it says rightly in the book) ... we get upset and go into our "cave" where we don't like being disturbed (also in the book), and the women will follow us in, wanting to resolve this issue ... meanwhile holding this damn book in their hand ... in the end, completely missing the whole point.

We will read the book and simply discard everything we read because logically, women simply don't make sense. However, due to the fact that it is considered a "women's book", most of us will never read it :)


Of course, the real solution to all of this is somewhere in the middle. I wish us all the luck in the world getting there. Getting right down to it, though, it'll never happen. We are from different planets and will never truely understand each other ... keeps things interesting, i guess :)

While I am chained to my desk here in Germany, I have once again grown to appreciate Shoutcast TV (even though I use Shoutcast radio on a daily basis for my streaming music from XTC Radio and DI Radio).

I packed extremely light for this two week "meeting", which means, save for a few books, I didn't bring any entertainment. I don't watch much TV back home (literally nothing since x-mas), but I do love my Sci-fi and cartoons ... I've been here a week now spending a lot of time fighting the jet-lag (being awake at odd hours with no motivation or energy to work) and the only English TV being CNN ... in comes Shoutcast.

I have now watched all episodes of Harry Birdman and Firefly ... one is on regular TV at odd hours and the other I have never been able to catch all the episodes, so I am quite pleased. I didn't plan on watching either show in particular as it is hard to connect to a particular show, so I select from a variety ... CSI, Angel, Birdman, Firefly, Smallville, X-men, and a few others that don't immediately come to mind ... and wait for one of them to connect.

Don't really have much else to say on the subject, except that the Winamp + Shoutcast combo has always been around to keep my workdays filled with the top music from Europe (because the pop crap that comes out of the US is just that) and keep the downtime entertainment there when I'm stuck with nothing else to do.

You know right after you have talked to someone that has had some amazing life experiences, or is simply very intelligent and you walk away feeling really good and/or you have a renewed look on life??

Well, i had one of those conversations yesterday ... with my daughter. I am currently in Germany for a couple weeks meeting with some clients. To call her (Alexis) at a decent time I had to stay awake until 3:30am (add the fact that i am still getting over the jetlag), but was totally worth it. This is the first time that I talked to her on the phone, so I had no idea what to expect ... she is only 4, so it was a very simple conversation ... every time she laughed or i could hear her smile I could feel my heart jump. Afterward I went to bed completely calm without a thought of all the work and other stresses surrounding me right now; remembering that the most important thing in my life is this beautiful little girl that has so much life in her and has so much to offer this world.

Yesterday, my roommate and a best friend, Chris, received a copy of a book cover he did last year. It is extremely well done and I am so proud of him. He undersells himself so much, and every time I see something like this, I can never understand why ... so, here is a copy of what he did:

I've had mixed feelings recently about this whole ordeal with China and Google's willingness to help with the repression of free-speech. I love Google for it's vision, morality, and access to information ... but, I find this to be a bit against all that, and more about the good, old American Dollar (which is growing weaker by the day against the CDN -- woot!) Google, of course, has tried put a good spin on it, saying that it is better to give them access to a restricted amount of knowledge then nothing at all ...

... I disagree. By restricting information, you are allowing only access to what other people want you to see / hear. It completely defeats the purpose and usefullness of Google and the internet if you can't get accurate information.

However, I just found a very good article on Digg found in The Globe And Mail saying that a project at the University of Toronto is working on breaking down this wall. Go Canadians! The article is a bit technical, but I think you can still get the jist of it ... I can see a potential for mis-use, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Backstory: Google's network in China has been buggy at best, so now they have been given the ability to use Google.cn in exchange for restricting search terms and websites that the gov't doesn't want it's people to access ... "Google hopes its new address will make the search engine easier to use and quicker" -- and make them more money.

This might be what i was looking for from the previous post ... happened to show up on Slashdot today:
Globe And Mail

I was reading the news (caption on TV) at the gym yesterday and heard another piece on how playing video games makes you smarter. This study was done by some University (missed because a hot girl walked in) that people who play video games scored well above others in tasks involving mind solving skills and multi-tasking. Of course, you could try and draw the opposite conclusion that these people enjoy playing video games because of the challenges in games that involve these skill sets.

Now, I always knew this, and is my running excuse for playing games when I should be working. The arguement being, the more time I spend playing games, the better results my employers will get when i actually get the task done ... I then tell them, "I hate video games. I'm doing this for you" --- kind of one of those, "this will hurt you more than me" lines. Anyway, the truth is, I love video games for the pure entertainment, but I will admit that I only like games that can challenge me AND entertain me.

Here is an exerpt from a related story, as I couldn't find anything on the one I was listening to.

Do Video Games Make Kids Smarter - Children who play such video games exhibit what experts call "fluid intelligence," or problem solving.

"They have to discover the rules of the game and how to think strategically," said James Paul Gee, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor. "Like any problem solving that is good for your head, it makes you smarter."

I've recently had some conversations with various people on the subject of marriage. They have ranged from extremely religious to quite the opposite.

I found it quite funny to hear many religous people admit openly that a main factor in their getting married was to have sex - and hence so many of them getting married between 18-22. If they jump into bed before marriage, they will receive a lot of flack from their follow worshipers ... a bit hypocritical when God himself is all forgiving.

Others get married when they feel "in love". Now, that's probably a lot better than the first, but when you get ingaged after only 6 months, do you really know?? The few long term relationships I've had has certain milestones. After 6 months, you are just getting a feel for who the person really is, as all the games played in the first few months start to dwindle and you stop trying to impress each other so much. Then, sometime between 1 yr and 1 1/2 yrs, all the little things that were extremely cute are now quite annoying. If you can get past these, then you start thinking about moving in and soon after, marriage ... in my opinion.

Now, that's not to say that it won't work if you don't follow any guidelines, but "logically" (i am male, afterall) it makes sense that you have a better chance if you wait. After all, if you are going to spend the rest of your life with this person, what's the big deal in getting married so fast.

Of course, the "what is love" came up a few times. I always thought you fall in and out of love without any control on your part. It's the feeling inside and all the things that you want to do and share with this person. Now, someone recently brought to my attention that love is "controllable". If you really want to be with someone, you can make yourself fall in love ... and rightfully, you can stop yourself from falling out of love. Now, if that is all true, then there is no point for me waiting for "the right women" because, apparently, it can be anyone i want it to be ... ?!?

But, as with religion and politics, it's one of those debates that has strong opposition no matter what side you are on. For now, I will just sit and wait for the right women to finish breaking up with / divorcing their current wrong partner for me to move in.

I'd like to say that my day started off perfect. Spent two hours with my daughter and had an awesome time ... but, what happened when I got home ... I had to go through over 10,000 emails .. ?? Why ... well, because I'm dumb enough to have agreed to be a server admin on a server where the programmers don't know enough about programming and how this wonderful world of ours works.

Well, lets start with the basics, so I don't lose everyone right away. You remember when you first got an email account and everyone is forwarding all those awesome jokes and the "this really works" emails to you ... and, in turn, you forward them to someone else. If you feel the need to bombard people with these rediculous emails, be smart about it. There is a reason that after a couple days of doing this that you start to get 1000's of spam messages. Somewhere down the line, someone went through your one of these forwards and picked through all the emails addresses and then put them on a mailling list.

... so, how do you protect yourself if you insist on forward this "crap" to other people? Put their email address in the BCC section and just send the message back to yourself ... why does this work? well, BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy ... this means that there is know way to know who else these emails were sent to because the addresses aren't attached to the message in any way. There is no way for even the brightest hacker to figure it out because it simply doesn't exist. To step it up a notch, you can even be nice to your friends that sent the message to you and delete all the email address that are included in the message as well ... do your part to clean up the internet, please!

Now, on to my issue. A similar mistake that people do is either put their own email address on the website or build a poor contact form. Now, the first issue doesn't directly affect me except that the client will bitch and complain that they are getting so much SPAM, and I will say "i told you not to do that" ... or "i'm sorry no one told you any better". However, the poorly built form apparently does affect me ... why? because every email that doesn't find a proper recipient gets bounced back to the server admin ... that's me! So, how do we fix this? Hire someone who knows what they hell they are doing. A form that doesn't do any checks for valid information or where the information is coming from can easily be hijacked and used as their own personal mail server - leaving me to clean up their mess ... my day has now been about getting those 10,000+ emails out of my mail box and sealing up the hole that someone created ... not my job, but I'd rather fix it then continue to get these emails.

... and breath.... that's my rant for today.

I'm at a huge dilema. I have been lucky enough to be self-employed right out of University, been to Europe 5 times because of it, and have great clients.

The struggles are many and the bonus' are many. It is quite hard to keep a steady schedule when you can work whenever you want. I am not money driven, so i have only ever worked to pay the bills and i spend the rest of my time relaxing and keeping the stress down. However, my clients ARE money driven and are trying to give me more and more work ... stress level goes up. I like the extra money, but not the extra hours.

On that note, I just lost a contract that I've had for a number of years that cuts my pay by quite a bit ... to add to that, i have incurred a few extra personal expenses that can't be avoided. I don't go the bar anymore and i rarely go out, so there aren't even any corners to cut. Anyway, the contract was a pain, but it was steady, so I liked it .. now it is gone. To make up for the extra loss, I have to find more work ... no longer steady.

So, comes the dilema. There is a great company in town that would probably hire me on the spot because I have been doing this for 5 years ... do i ditch my clients and get a schedule or struggle till i can get more work? To add to the problem, i have never advertised or put myself out there ... EVERY job has come from a referral from another client (maybe because I'm cheaper ... maybe it's the work ...?). So, it isn't that easy for me to find the work.

Self Employement UP's:
1) lots of flexibility
2) pick and choose projects and clients
3) sleeping in whenever

Downs:
1) completely self-motivated (up or down, i guess)
2) inconsistant pay check
3) sometimes i have to work weekends and strange hours (ie. last night i was up till 4:30am - which is what got this rant going - to make matters worse, i started getting calls at 8:30 and slept like s**t)

... i'll probably stick to what i'm doing as i would feel too guilty to bail on my clients ... and some of them are pretty big and relying on me ... probably more than they should.