Artificial Cheese

So I decided that my blog needs another series of entries. This one has to do with opposing our newly elected leader, Barack Obama. No, I’m not a republican, but I don’t have to agree with the guy just because I like him. In fact, I’ll criticize him and ridicule him on my little corner of the internet BECAUSE I like him. I think he deserves my attention.

DC got it’s first bit of wintery precipitation over the week. I was conveniently out of town, but supposedly it was a bit slippery. So a bunch of places, like schools, decided to shut down for the safety of the people who potentially had to deal with the ice. The result was happy kids, relieved parents, and one angry black president.

Malia …and Sssssasha… Obama were amongst the countless victims of the school closings, and Daddy Obama was having none of it. “Grumble grumble,” said Barack, “…grumble grumble.” Sure that’s not what he actually said, but that’s certainly what he meant. What he actually said was, “folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things. Maybe they need some flinty Chicago toughness.”

Really? After all that talk about respecting differences and making change, all you can do is say that people from here are tougher than people from there? Granted, people in Washington, DC have absolutely unexplainable reactions to precipitation, and downright absurd behavioral instincts when they see snow or ice, but people are different. People are good at handling what they adjust to, like Chicago and snow. Washington, DC happens to be good at making sure presidents don’t get shot at, and a little gratitude is in order for inauguration week.

And maybe DC can’t handle ice well, but DC sure handles ice better than Chicago handles fire. Every time someone lights a match, half the damn city burns down. In fact, I don’t think you can use the words ‘flinty’ and ‘Chicago’ in the same sentence without having a fire marshall standing by.

So settle down, Barack. The four years ahead are going to be long enough without hypothermiated disgruntled government employees screwing up the census and spitting in your mail. Maybe putting a little more emphasis on the plummeting economy or the looming environmental crisis would give you more traction with the constituents.

So I’m a 26 year old boy who is getting into his first relationship. I know what you’re thinking, how can someone so handsome and so witty with a job and a college degree never have been in a relationship? Well I don’t know I guess, and I am not going to answer that question now. I just wanted to ask it rhetorically because I like calling myself ‘handsome’.

Regardless of my history, I have been in siutations where I’ve interacted with women. I would pass by them in the street, have an occasional conversation with a woman about current events, and other every day interactions. I always considered myself to be a gentleman and do chivalrous things without ill intentions in my mind. This includes things like opening a door and letting the woman in first, giving up a seat on a bus, or just making eye contact during conversations and not stare at their chests.

So when I entered into my first relationship, I didn’t skip a beat. I took precautions to make sure that my counterpart was always comfortable. Open the door for her, do the driving whenever I could, pay for dinner, do the dishes, etc. Some of these things were appreciated and others were less appreciated, but I can understand why; some actions come off as chivalrous and others come off as passively accusing a woman of helplessness.

I was under the impression that I was doing well. Everyone seemed happy enough. Just then, the concept that drives many relationships into the ground was put squarely in front of my face. Getting whipped.

Being whipped is a terrifying notion to a man, especially one that is new to the world of relationships. The observation of my being whipped was brought up as I was retrieving a sandwich from Quiznos for my counterpart in the relationship. Immediately I put my entire chivalrous routine under the microscope and began to question…

“Did she thank me?”…”Would she thank me once I get the sandwich?”…”What would she do if I didn’t get her a sandwich?”…”Why should I be getting this sandwich for her?”…”Why can’t she get her own?”

You can see where this rabbit hole leads; it goes spiraling down about sandwiches, then spiraling outwards towards every chivalrous act that you’ve ever performed, then it boils up with words like ‘control’ and ‘manipulation’. Every action becomes evidence and every request becomes fuel to the fire. Then the danger comes when you’re sitting in a car alone at 1am, crusing down the turnpike and doing microsurgery on every single facial expression and every subtlety made during your time together.

The analysis ends and the pettyness begins. “Can you find directions to the theater?” …”Do it yourself!”. “Can you pass the salt?”…”Why can’t you get it?”. “Can you stop sitting on my neck?”…”Make me!”.

After it gets petty, it gets ugly. “She doesn’t walk the dog anymore”…”He might lose some weight if he helps me around the house some times.”…”His mother is so nosy, I wish she’d just stop staring at us through the window all the time.”

It’s scary, I know. The first step in avoiding this problem is identifying the signs of being whipped. So how do you know? How do you know if you’re being chivalrous and a gentleman, or simply being whipped? The only measure is to attempt to deviate and gauge the response.

Next time you’re asked to go get a drink for your girlfriend or boyfriend, stop and make the same request back. If the reponse is an enthusiastic, “Okay!”, then you’re probably not whipped. If the response is an unenthusastic, “Okay…” then there’s a small chance that you’re being taken for granted. If the response is bitterness, anger, or getting slapped across the face, then you’re whipped. If she’s pregnant, handicapped or an amputee then this whole test should have been avoided in the first place.

Also, try to not reach for the check next time you’re at the local IHOP for some country fried steak bonanza. If the response is an immediate reach for the check from your counterpart, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you need to nudge the check to the other side of the table, you might have a problem. If your girlfriend or boyfriend starts flirting with the waiter then you might want to consider having that talk. Again, if you’re dating a homeless person or a blind person, make the appropriate changes to the test.

Using these types of tests (sparingly) should allow you to get a good idea of where you stand in your relationship. Test early and test often, and you could catch the disease early enough to treat it. Talk to your doctor about testing for being whipped today. Oh, and if you’re looking for how to actually SOLVE the problem of being whipped, I’d advise you to look to someone else for some answers.

I know you’re scared. You have to be. In addition to hurricanes, earthquakes, global warming, gas prices, the prospect of Palin becoming president, now the Dow has lost 17,000 points in the past 2 days. Yeah you’re scared alright, but you’ve come to the right place. This blog was put here for one reason: to equip its readers with the necessary skills to survive in a harsh economic climate, amongst other things. Let me help you put your mind at ease; grab a pen and some paper and remember these easy steps to survival.

1. Purchase Canned Goods and Oxo Good Grips Can Opener

I think Sir Winston Churchill said it best when he said, “The s–t’s really hit the fan now!” That was in reference to World War II, but his eloquance rings just as true now as it did in the face of tyranny decades ago.

As a proud American, I know what your first concern will be; stuffing your face. Now–I don’t want to alarm you, but sooner or later this economic crisis will close down all of your beloved Olive Gardens and Red Lobsters, leaving you with absolutely nothing to eat. Food is the staple of this culture, and it can be argued that this culture is in the can anyway, so stock up on your favorite varieties of Chef Boyardee and Campbell’s soups — and don’t get the healthy stuff, its not worth it.

Here comes the important part–make sure you get the right can opener. I know you probably have that 12-speed 7000rpm electric can opener that you put up as a gag gift on your wedding registry that some gag uncle baught; but try to think ahead. When the electric company goes belly up and the looters tear the power lines down to drink their nectar, how are you going to get that can open?

The answer is the best can opener in the world! The Oxo Good-Grips Can Opener. This thing changed the way I think about cans completely. No more jagged edges, severe lacerations, broken bones or assault charges. Carefully slice the top off of a can, then use the top as a lid again! No batteries required, and no electricity.

2. Tivo EVERYTHING

Alright America, your biggest concern was taken care of by #1, and you should have enough food to last you through the first few days of chaotic anarchy. But you’re still worried, right? Thats because the next concern we need to tackle could mean the difference between Dancing with the Stars and Project Run-away when angry crowds of bored looters tear down your door.

I’m talking about entertainment. The television has the power to turn an angry productive individual into a docile creature, and take the sting out of any remotely serious situation. Its up to you to make sure that you always have the soothing fuzz of brainless television to put your mind off of the impending collapse of the modern world. Fire up your TiVO and grab EVERYTHING; Seinfeld, The Daily Show, The Cosby Show, The Late Show, heck, even The Price is Right with Drew Carey.

And one thing you absolutely, positively must record is Man vs. Wild.

3. Watch Man vs. Wild

Survival is all about survival, and The time is coming where you will have to cut open the neighbor’s dog and sleep within it’s still-warm carcass for survival through the harsh autumn evenings. But how on Earth will you know how to do that if you don’t let Bear Grylls tell you? No matter what sort of climate you live in, or how big your camera crew is, you will definitely learn more than you ever wanted to know about survival when you watch a man named Bear feast on frogs named Lunch.

But how exactly do you WATCH your TiVO’ed Man vs. Wild episodes after the powerlines have been cut and used as rope to scale the walls of the local authorities buildings? Well you’ll need one of these things…

4. Buy One of These Things

These things are awesome. They’re called PCGs, which stand for Pull-Cord Generators. The premise is that you grab the handle, and then PULL IT as HARD as you can over and over. THe friction caused by the pull cord creates a stupid effect, where people are embarassed to be seen with you; but its enough to charge a cell phone after you pull it for 3 or 4 days. Details aside, you can power a small house with this PCG - thus solving all of your power problems for good.

So we’ve got food…we’ve got survival skills, entertainment…

…power…

5. Learn to Eat Grass

Alright, if you’ve followed all of the steps above, you’ll most likely survive about 4 hours before you find yourself covered in bloody dog intestines and throwing up week old beefaroni while pulling a ripcord to power your electric can opener because you JUST CAN’T FIGURE OUT how the Oxo Good-grips can opener works. In other words, you’re out of the jungle.

So once that dust settles and the anarchy subsides, its time to rely on resourcefulness to get you through the next few minutes. The first thing that needs to be done is you need to learn how to eat grass. It’s delicious, abundent, and renewable. Cow’s eat it, why can’t we?

After you’ve re-engineered your gastrointestinal organs to be chlorophyll-friendly, you’ve officially made grass into a resource. Resources require management and ownership, and ownership requires a giant army of loyal soldiers.

6. Start Building an Army

I cannot stress enough the importance of an army to stake your claim to the territories of the new world. The rules as you know them will no longer apply, and the strongest will inherit the Earth for a little while longer. From experience, I’ve found that the best way to raise an army is to promise great riches and an endless supply of women to the first 100 people, then the next few hundred will join because ‘all the cool kids are doing it’. Just make sure you put the first hundred at the frontlines when the fighting starts, thus releasing you of your promises.

When the fighting subsides and the feudalism begins, your army will make a good base of serfs and workers as they build you a strong castle. Assuming you’ve run out of Chef Boyardee and Speghetti-O’s at this point, you might want to think about planting some corn at this point…hmm…but that takes too long…

7. Learn to Prepare Human Flesh for Consumption

Screw it, once you run out of grass to eat it’s time to sink your teeth into your neighbor Bill. Raw human tastes a little game-y so make sure you know how to turn Bill into a Billicious feast now, rather than later. He’s rich in protein, calcium, and nicotine. He’s also been eating your grass while you weren’t looking, so you’re entitled to his flesh as due payment.



There you have it! If you follow these easy steps to survival, you’ll figure out that all-out panic would have probably been a more appropriate response to the economic crisis.

From time to time, I’ll be re-posting things that I wrote a few years ago on the now-defunct funksysteme.org. This will be the first of some. Then there will be more.

Being intelligent and sounding intelligent have nothing to do with each other. This is the reason that so many people can get away with one without the other. I’ve known many intelligent people who don’t get the intellectual credibility that they deserve because they have questionable communication traits. Along the same lines, I’ve seen lesser men and women get great college educations and well paying jobs because they know how to sound professional. This article was not written with the purpose of pointing out pseudointellectuals, but it was written to level the playing field. Before we get to the rules, lets go over some misconceptions…

Misconceptions

A common misconception regarding good communication skills is the requirement of a large vocabulary. This is an easy mistake to make, especially since we’re raised to believe the contrary through the SATs and years of looking up words in dictionary for English class. I’m here to tell you that this is absolutely incorrect. You can talk your way into anything with a small and humble vocabulary. The key is to exercise what you know and use the most appropriate word in your arsenal at every opportunity, and for god’s sake, don’t use words that you don’t know.

But while exploring your vocabulary remember that speaking in a profound tone is generally not required. In most situations it’s viewed as a blantent attempt to impress someone with your ability to sound convoluded. This includes quoting proverbs, greek philosophers, and things that ‘Confucius say’. If you have something to say, simply pick the right words for the job and say it.

The Rules

Be advised that these rules are not written with ease of use in mind. Not even I can practice all of these rules without slipping up frequently. But if you can remember these rules and identify the mistakes as you make them, you’ve already started sounding smarter. The best practice is to use these rules in all situations. If you truely want to sound smarter you can’t switch these rules on and off depending on who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about, keep your speech patterns consistent. Now on with the rules…

“Like…”

This is like, and article about like, sounding intelligent. It looks stupid in writing, doesn’t it? I identified this problem that I had a few years ago. It’s a leftover from high school, where everyone speaks like they’re a Valley Girl regardless of gender or masculinity. It sounds juvenile, and exhibits a disconnect between your brain and your mouth. If you decide that you want to overcome your dependency on this word, make sure you come prepared with patience because it is a giant undertaking.

“They”

Words like “he”, “she”, “they”, and “it” are known as Pronouns. Words like “fire”, “gas” and “fire extinguisher” are known as nouns. When pronouns are used properly they eliminate the redundency of nouns in your sentences. Unfortunately, people have an ugly habit of overusing pronouns. This means that sentences like, “Get the fire extinguisher to put out the fire caused by the gas” come out like, “get the thing to put it out.”

You need to keep in mind that the speaker always knows what they’re talking about. The words coming out of your mouth need to convey the ideas in your head to someone else’s head. Even at the risk of sounding redundant, use nouns and avoid pronouns whenever possible. This practice will make for much more meaningful sentences.

“Umm…”

This is a toughy, and its almost impossible to correct completely. If you observe a good speaker you will notice that every sound they make is a part of a word. Rarely do they use sounds like, “Umm…”, “Err…”, “Uhhh…” and, “AARGHAA!” to fill the silence. To a speaker with the habit to make this sound it’s like a cats purr. It’s comforting and soothing, making their hesitation feel less impactful on the conversation.

To the listener it sounds like you’re preoccupied with a thought of Carmen Electra riding a mechanical bull while sucking on a lollipop. In other words, something more important. Regardless of priorities you should keep your sentences connected and clean. If you need to pause just remain silent between sentences while you gather the words you need to use.

“Basically”

“Basically” can be one of the most infuriating words in the english language if it’s used incorrectly. Before you make this word a part of your involuntary vocabulary, make sure that you know what it means and how to use it.

“Basically” means exactly what it spells. You take an idea and break it down to something more basic. If I say, “Its a nice day outside” and you respond with, “Basically.” then you are dead to me. If I say, “Mitosis is a process of cell division which results in the production of two daughter cells from a single parent cell” and you respond with, “Basically.” then you win a pat on the back.

“Yeah” = “Yes”

Finally, an easy one. This is a quick and easy way to kill your street cred and sound more intelligent at the same time. Every time you have the urge to say “yeah”, say “yes”. In fact, this one is so easy that you can manage to turn it on and off rather than saying “Yes” all of the time. The best time to turn this on is when talking to the police. The word “yeah” is indicitive of guilt, so always respond to police inquiries with “Yes” or no.

Know the difference: Technically, Practically, Literally

These words are not interchangable, and in most cases these words are used incorrectly and haphazardly. Lets start with the most frequently misused word: Literally. There are people who literally use this word wrong all the time. See? I used it wrong right there. This word means, “in a literal or strict sense”. Now if I meant to use that word correctly, I would be saying that there are people who never use the word correctly. While this may be true, its not how the average reader would comprehend the meaning of this sentence. A correct useage of literal is, “When he said that he wants you to eat his shorts, he meant it literally.”

Practically is used when describing something as practial, and never anywhere else. If you say that a club is usually jumpin jumpin, but tonight it’s practically dead, then you are saying that its death is practical. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you go to a club if you consider its death practical? Tell me. Tell me why you’d go to a club if you consider its death practical. You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t go if you thought its death was practical. If you knew what the word “practically” meant maybe you would make more sense.

Sorry. Moving on, we’re left with the word, “Technically”. This word means “with regard to technique” or “in regards to technical capacity”. It is NOT the opposite of the incorrect meaning of “Basically”. If I say, “Its raining outside”, and you respond with “Techincally, yes, but I will still pick up the pizza.” i’ll respond by eating six slices just to spite your lack of respect for the english language.

Take your time, control the pace

The speed of a conversation can have a huge impact on the quality of your reponses. When you’re up against someone who speaks at an above average pace, don’t try to run at the same pace if you’re not prepared. You’ll end up with broken sentences and poorly constructed reponses. Remember what your first girlfriend said? Its not a race, take your ti…

What she was trying to say was “take your time”. There is no need to speak at someone else’s pace, let them slow down for you.

On the other hand, if you’re the fast talker then you should exploit your abilities to the fullest. There is nothing more persuasive than a tightly-packed five words per second. You can get anything you want from a slow talker if you can attack them with speed, but make sure you don’t speak wrecklessly.

Keep it short

Trust me, busy people appreciate short conversations. It may be more comfortable to have a nice, leisurely conversation but it is not appropriate in all situations. When you’re trying to make an impact on someone as an intellectual, you should approach your conversation like a lumberjack would approach a tree. Each word of each sentence should be well-aimed and calculated. Any words that don’t hit the mark are just wasted energy.

“Aaaaand….”

Good writers generally make good speakers. While speaking you should visualize the punctuation that you would use if you were writing. Pause when you hit a comma, scream when you hit an exclaimation point, and please use periods. If you stream your thoughts directly from your mind to your mouth then it will all come out as one long sentence because that is how it exists in your brain.

“I went to the movies aaaaand I saw one of my friends from school soooo…we went to a restaurant aaaaand Frank ordered a steak aaaand John started laughing so I asked why aaaaaannd…” and I just stopped listening. Listening to something without structure, or an ending, is hard on the listener. It also lends an impression that you approach everything in life without consideration or structure.

Conclusion

In today’s world of first impressions and bump-and-run encounters the ability to exude intelligence, however shallow, is very important. But these rules are just a list of good verbal habits, they don’t go over things like good eye contact, good posture, and general body language. If you are interested in more than a superficial impression of intelligence, study professional speakers and politicians. These people are usually trained in all aspects of verbal communciation, and simply watching them can be a very rewarding experience.

One of the joys of airports and train stations is the abundance of people who are begging to be judged and analyzed. I had an hour long delay at Penn Station waiting for the “Vermonter” from Amtrak to take me to Union Station in DC.

For the duration of this wait, I stood in the area between the 8th St. exits that contains the giant board which displays arrivals and departures. There were a few moments when I considered wandering around Penn Station during the delay, but the types of people waiting with me kept me glued to the crowd. It started with the tiny Indian family.

Tiny Indian Family

It was a standard sized Indian family. One mother, one father, one daughter, one son. Each one grabbing their ticket as if it were the key to happiness in their giant imposing world of inadequacy. The father led the pack, with each member of the family following in decending order of dominance. The most distinguishing factor about them was that each member in the family was 4-5 inches shorter than anyone else in the room.

I didn’t even notice them until they were right under my chin. The mother was peering through the trees of people calling out track numbers in Gujrati while the father ignored her, and the elder sister was screaming at the younger brother to keep his hand out of his mouth as the drooly-fisted brother looked up and around in amazement. As they passed by like a tiny little freight train, they were suddenly stopped by a white woman who stepped right in their path while on a cell phone, saying loudly, “If someone died, I wouldn’t want to know. I wouldn’t …even want to know.” The entire family stopped and stared for a brief moment of judgement before they were off again.

Around and under the crowd, I tracked their movements based on the bending of the crowd like dogs in a wheat field. They made their way to the opposite end of the giant room and out through the 8th Ave and 31st St. exit. Judging by my encounter with them, that is not where they wanted to go; but it might have been the best thing for everyone.

The Stud, Captain Obvious, and the Two Confused Blondes

A few minutes after the Indian family cleared the man-maze to freedom, two average slightly overweight New York guys in their early 40s approach and setup a standing camp beside me. The greyer of the two men, Captain Obvious, begins to speak to the Stud.

Persistently, Captain Obvious continues to find something obvious to talk about until the Stud stops answering. At this point, a young blonde woman in front of us, wearing a short skirt, begins to do stretches to loosen up her inner-thigh muscles. Everyone stops talking. Women look angry, men’s mouths are suddenly unable to close, and me thinking how I can make it into a blog entry.

Eventually the stretching stopped and everyone resumed their normal activities. Captain Obvious starts up once again, but this time with an action item.

Captain Obvious leaves behind his verbally battered companion and makes his way through the crowd to the book store. The young streching blonde begins to look back towards the Stud for short moments of time and then stops. Its quite distinct but the Stud doesn’t notice.

A moment later another young blonde begins making her way towards us from about 20 feet away in a crowded room. She must have passed 20-30 people to get to where we were, only to turn to the Stud and ask, “Excuse me, do you know what the ’stand by’ status means next to my train?”

I’m not sure whats going on here. First, she could have asked any one of the people that were more conveniently located near her original position. Seoondly, who doesn’t know what ‘Stand By’ means? It means ‘wait’. As the confused blonde walked away I attempted to draw a conclusion based on her actions, but before I was finished another strange occurance was thrown into the mix.

The stretching blonde turned around as soon as the confused blonde left and asked, “Which train was she talking about?” The Stud, dumbfounded by the sudden attention, said, “Uh…the one that says ‘Stand by’ next to it.” There was only one train with a ‘Stand by’ status. Awkwardly, the young blonde said, “Oh…I thought she was talking about the train I’m supposed to be taking.”

Now I’m really confused. Why would the Stud know which train she was supposed to be taking? Every question asked to this guy was useless. It was like an Axe body spray commercial. The only thing that I could deduce was that he had some pheromone spray like Love Potion No.9 that drew women into him.

Just that moment, Captain Obvious comes back and starts up his obvious talk once again.

I couldn’t take anymore so I decided to take my wheely bag and move to another spot in the room.

Departure

So finally the train arrived, a full hour late. As the travellers congregate around the escalator down to the track, who do I see but the confused blonde. She has two giant bags that she’s wheeling around behind her and hitting everyone in the thighs. I let her pass in front of me as to avoid a thigh smashing, and she settles into the crowd waiting for the escalator to turn on.

On the other side of the crowd, I notice stretchly blonde too. This is an odd turn of events because the only certainty that could have been drawn from their earlier interaction was that the two blondes were NOT on the same train.

The escalator starts up, and the crowd begins to move. Confused blonde hits the escalator first and doesn’t understand the protocol even though she saw the handful of the people in front of her go through the motions. “Ticket Please.” Of course she has it in one of her giant bags. To her credit, she zipped into one of her bags and pulled out the ticket in a split second. Unfortunately she lost all that credit when she tried to take both bags down an escalator side-by-side and didn’t understand the basic concepts of space and matter.

Eventually she got down and the crowd moved along. As I approached the escalator, a familiar group turned up once again. Who other than the Indian drooly-fist crew cuts right along the side of the escalator and takes a sharp turn into the front of the line before heading down the escalator.

I finally make my way into the train with my obscure wait-mates. I realize that people seem to have lost the ability to ’stand by’. Its been lost to the point that people don’t even know what it means anymore. The mere idea of ‘Stand by’ causes people to run around and do all kinds of crazy things to avoid the idea of being in one spot. So the moral of the story is to take a chill pill. I gotta stop writing because my train just arrived at it’s destination.

The combination of reduced time resources and a ill-conceived routine of work and video games has pinched off my contributions to this blog for the past couple of months. In response to this problem, I decided to leave the writing engines on idle and throw together some code.

So if you’re suffering from withdrawal from my writings, visit the Funksysteme Archives (http://fsarchives.cheesefingers.com/) and get your fix! It contains a bunch of work authored between 2004-2006 from funksysteme’s deprecated site, funksysteme.org. The archives don’t contain the robust functionality or the plucky extras from the original site, but the meat is there, so take a look.

Travelling through airports and subways over the past year or so has given me exposure to a new state of people’s time and behavior. I like to call that state “isolated public idleness”. Its that state that people are in while waiting for a plane or standing around for a train. Its an unnatural and awkward state that everyone dreads and requires foresight for most people to deal with properly.

Some people attack the ‘isolated’ portion of the fabricated term by grabbing their cell phone and having (or pretending to have) a conversation with someone who is hopefully in their own state of isolated idleness. Everyone attacks the ‘public’ portion of the term to some extent by distancing themselves away from others, whether its running to a corner of an open space to avoid interaction, fixating their field of view to avoid looking at someone, or tucking in their elbows as to not break the illusion of privacy by making physical contact.

But I want to take a look at the last word in the term. I’ve always taken notice of those who attack the idleness by whatever means necessary. This involves things like reading, opening up the laptop and just clicking around, iPods, staring at the screen on your cell phone as if there is something worthwhile on it. It even spawns spontaneous hunger when flocks of people find masticating as the perfect past time. They’re not hungry, they’re just bored.

As I type this in an airport terminal, a man just walked into the area, found that the flight as been delayed, and as fallen asleep on the ground so he doesn’t even need to face the state of idleness.

I always found myself to be above this fear, and above the need for some sort of sensory stimulation at all times. I used to take these opportunities to sit and stare, and let my thoughts go off however they please. Sometimes they’d lead to great ideas, other times they’d go in circles. Lots of them even lead to blog entries. But I always was proud of the fact that I could sit in one spot; okay with the isolation, okay with the public around me, and okay with the idleness.

Sometime between my months flying to Montreal and my new engagement in Wisconsin, I’ve lost the ability to stand idle without stimulation. I found that I’ve become one of those huddled wired up figures that line the airport hallways, feeding off of power outlets like an insect feeds on the skin of a warm blooded animal. I even looked at a man who interrupted my typing of this blog entry with disdain, as he asked if a coat on an empty chair was mine. It wasn’t mine because I was wearing mine, but I’ve never found answering a question to be a problem.

Tomorrow is the International Day of Awesomeness, so for my awesome feat I’m gonna take the earbuds out of my head, and my eyes off of the screen, and try to return to my isolated public idleness without relying on my physical senses to get me through it.

I’ve been working at National Institutes of Health for a while, and my time there is slowly drawing to a close. I’ve had a lot of good memories and made some friends, but one thing that will stick in my mind is the vending machine that had strange powers over the value of the money in my pocket. Let me start explaining with some facts:

1. The Magic Vending Machine is in a break room with a couple other vending machines.
2. The other vending machines in that room are capable of turning a dollar bill into four quarters.
3. Everything I want in The Magic Vending Machine is either 80 cents or 55 cents.
4. Exact change required.

Seems pretty typical, right? Now I’ll explain my first few experiences with this machine.

Show up at work around 9am, setup my laptop and start to work. At some point, I get hungry for a snack so I walk over to the break room to see what the vending machine has to offer. Pretzels…80 cents, Snack Mix…55 cents, Animal Crackers…80 cents. At this point I start asking people if they can break a dollar bill. After a couple rejections, a veteran of the break room told me that I could insert my bill into an adjacent machine, then hit the coin return button to receive 4 quarters.

Great! So now I have four quarters. I’m almost there; I can use three of the four quarters to add up to 80 cents so I can get my animal crackers! But now how do I get the nickel?

So for the last 4 months, I’ve been approaching random people and asking them if they are willing to trade a nickel for a quarter. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Dev: “Hey, I was wondering if you’d be willing to trade a nickel for this quarter?”
<hold up quarter>
Target: “…”
Dev: “I need some animal crackers.”
Target: “Umm.”

Generally their next statement is along the lines of “Why?” or “What’s the catch?” or “Where’s the camera?”, then I need to tell the tale of the mysterious vending machine that somehow makes nickels more valuable than quarters. Most of them just give me a nickel because I was a good sport and told them a story. Some rare few listen to the story and then explain that they don’t have a nickel. Some people offer me dimes and quarters because they don’t quite understand the predicament. But how can you blame them? This doesn’t make any sense!

What I’ve also found in the past few months that makes matters even worse is that nickels are exceedingly rare due to the way the values of coins are aligned. If you look in your coin repository right now, how does the number of nickels compare to the number of other coins? You have less, right? I thought about it and I concluded that nickels are never really useful when receiving change after purchasing something. Make a list from 1 cent through 99 cents, then think about how many cases would result in a nickel being returned as opposed to other coins. You’ll see that a nickel is only expected in about 15 cases: 5-9 cents, 15-9 cents, 55-59 cents. Everything else is a combination of quarters, dimes, and pennies.

Unfortunately there is no moral to this blog entry. Perhaps a good moral is that if a person comes to you with a seemingly unreasonable request, don’t assume that they have a nickel fetish, or that they’re building a house out of nickels.

I’ll try to keep this post readable, but you need to have at least an intermediate knowledge of computers to follow along. A few years ago, people in the tech world started catching onto the benefits of ‘virtual machines’ to help loosen the link between hardware and software. Virtual machines are entire computers that are implemented through software. In other words, the end result of a virtual machine in Windows is a computer screen in a window on your Windows desktop that is running totally unaware of the fact that its contained within another machine.

For software developers, the benefits are vast. First of all, chicks dig virtual machines. Secondly, you gain the ability to distribute, swap, and create entire machines with the click of a few buttons. These virtual machines run on virtualization software like VMWare, that was once just marketted for testing software easily in different operating systems, but now has become a staple many IT infrasturctures.

Its a great step in the right direction for IT, but what about everyone else? What about the ‘I just check my email and surf the web’ group that wants to boast to their friends about their awesome Virtual Machines. Is there any practical use for the average home user? Unfortunately the benefits generally don’t outweigh the costs of setting up such an environment. The only exceptions are if you want to do it for fun, try to impress your spouse, or have very specific computer usage patterns that fits with the concept of virtual machines.

First I’ll go over the basic steps for setting up a virtual machine. If you’re planning to setup this sort of environment for yourself, find some more detailed instructions. These steps are just to give you an idea of whats involved with setting up the environment:

1. Download virtualization software - There are two solid options here. VMWare’s stuff, and Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007. I will proceed with the assumption that Microsoft’s package was chosen because its free, and its more home user friendly (in my opinion).
2. Setup a Virtual Disk - Not as complicated as it sounds. Just tell Virtual PC that you want to create a virtual disk file on your hard drive. You tell Virtual PC how big you want it to be, and where you want to put it. The end result is one giant file on your hard drive that represents your entire virtual machine’s disk.
3. Setup an operating system on the virtual disk - This is the big step. Since you setup a blank virtual disk and have it running on a virtual machine, you’ve essentially got a brand new (virtual) computer with no software, including no Windows. This is also the step that costs users the most since they need to find a licensed version of Windows laying around in their house. If you’ve got an old version of Windows 2000 or something, then this is the time to dust it off and set it up.

The process takes about 2 hours for the first time around. The end result will be a virtual Windows desktop running on your actual desktop. Great, right? Now what are you supposed to do? In the IT world, we would use this opportunity to install a database for very specific data or possibly a web server that we can use to distribute to different machines. But what about the home user? Just another box to check email and surf the web? Like I said early on, the benefits generally don’t outweigh the costs for the average home user, but maybe some pros and cons will help give you some idea of whats possible:

Benefits

• Truely independent environments - This is a really neat use of virtual machines. In the past, I’ve heard many novice computer users ask me, “how can I let people use my computer, but not be able to see my stuff?” The concept of a “Windows user account” is very weak, because the entire machine is shared between users aside from a small set of settings and a documents folder. Everything else is accessible to all users, and in the home edition of XP and Vista, theres nothing you can do about it.

  Now imagine the question answered with two level of Windows. When you turn your computer on, you get prompted for the shared username and password, the one you give to your spouse and children. After logging in, you have a desktop with one icon per family member. Each icon opens up a virtual computer, and when the virtual computer boots up, you are prompted for your personalized username and password. Now you have an environment that is 100% independent from the environments of the other users in your family.

  In the past, this was a crazy idea because it involves a tremendous amount of hard drive space. But nowadays, a 500gb hard drive costs as much as a modest mouse. Space is no longer a concern. Licensing windows remains an issue so that is where having old copies of operating systems is a good idea.

• Backups - Remember when your hard drive crashed a few years ago and you lost all of your wedding pictures so you had to go to your friends and syphon their pictures to restore your album? What about those terrible 80s songs that you downloaded from Napster? Napster’s gone now, how are you supposed to get them back? For months after the crash you always remembered something else that you lost, and the same thought goes through your head; “I should have done a backup.”

  Do you remember why you didn’t, and still haven’t, done a backup? Because you’ve got no damn idea what a backup is or how to perform one. Your friend told you to 10 years ago to “put it on a CD.” Put what on a CD? You want to put your entire computer on a CD, but you figure out after a while that its not possible for an entire computer to exist on a CD. You can buy software like Norton Ghost, but are you really confident that you’ll know how to restore the backup if your drive crashes?

  With virtual machines, your entire computer exists as a file. A backup of your system only involves one step: copying this file somewhere else, like on an external HD. You can even setup windows scheduler to run the backup every night, just one copy command and you’re done. Heck, keep 5 copies and roll them so you can backup your system to 5 days ago, before you opened that v1@grA cialis email that caused your computer to experience unwanted side effects. Now when you have a hard drive crash, you just restore your main system, install Virtual PC, and get your virtual machine backup from that external HD. You’re up and running again.

• Portability - iPods and notebook computers might have you thinking that the word ‘portable’ means ’small’, but thats not the case. Portable is actually something that can be moved or transported quickly and easily. In this case, we’re talking about virtual machines. The portable nature of a virtual machine lies with the fact that the entire machine is contained within a single binary file. As large as this file may seem, it can be moved around on its own, and loaded up anywhere with a Windows operating system.

  So lets think up a scenerio where this would come in handy. Christmas time is a great example. Its January 22nd, you’ve got a 5 hour drive to the inlaws and your wife is standing at the door with suitcases and trying to get the kids to stop crying while you finish up the big presentation thats due on the 28th. You don’t own a laptop, and you want to bring your work with you so you can get stuff done while your wife talks about your back hair and digestive irregularities to her family besides the christmas tree. So you start unplugging your desktop and asking your wife if her parents have a power strip, which would be completely unnecessary if you were using virtual machines.

  With virtual machines, you simply take your virtual disk file, load it onto your son’s iPod, and load it up on your inlaw’s machine. Its like taking the entire computer with you. Every computer with Windows XP or greater can run Virtual PC. Now when your father-in-law walks in on you looking at porn on his computer and asks, “are you looking at porn on my computer?!” You can respond, “No, I’m looking at porn on my VIRTUAL computer.” before you start looking for hotel rooms on your virtual computer.

Downsides

• Gaming - Well, every silver lining has a dark cloud. If you’re an avid video game player that loves the high quality graphics of recent games, don’t try to run a virtual machine. These machines have strong performance for business applications but sharing video resources with your host machine makes high end games a bit of a nasty experience.
• Licenses - Microsoft isn’t in the charity business, so acquiring licenses for each installation of an Operating System is no trivial matter. If you’re interested in setting up XP or Vista on your virtual machine then you better get ready to pay for it. If you’re not interested in paying, and don’t have old copies of windows lying around, the good thing is that there are free linux based operating systems you could potentially fall back on.

There you have it. I’ve just started experimenting with virtual machines for home use myself, and it really requires a new mindset to fully understand the benefits. I only listed what I could here, I’m sure that there are many more interesting uses for these virtual machines depending on one’s degree of technical abilities.

About three weeks ago, K-Mart released a coupon that granted the user 20% off anything in the store, aside from a few logical exceptions listed in the fine print. A new Playstation 3 was not listed as one of the exceptions. This was a perfect opportunity to buy a PS3.

At the same time, I was knee deep in working on a project that sucked up almost all of my free time. Prior to this coupon, my plan was to buy a PS3 when my schedule thinned out a little bit and I had some time to enjoy the device. Now I was faced with a decision: buy now to save money, or risk buying it later and lose out on the $80 savings.

If you know me, you know that my impulsions always get the best of me when it comes to electronics. So my cousin and I ran out to a K-Mart and luckily picked up the last two 40GB PS3s in the store. When I arrived home with the device, I kept it in the packaging since I did not have any games to play and returned to my work.

The next morning I decided that I should make sure that the PS3 works, just in case I need to return the product. I took the PS3 out of the box, hooked it up, and I was greeted by a loud, rich sound during startup. “That was cool,” I thought to myself.

When the menu was displayed on my television I instinctively starting browsing. As I browsed through the menu I slowly realized that the PS3 is hardly a console, it is a complete media solution. What I was displeased with is that I didn’t know all of the PS3’s capabilities until it was sitting in my house and attached to my television.

I understand that I could have done more research on the PS3 and known all of its capabilities, but the fact of the matter is that I shouldn’t need to do that. If Sony’s product group saw fit to include these features into the PS3, then Sony’s marketting department should take it upon themselves to make those features known to the potential customers. I can’t imagine how many sales are being lost just because every PS3 commercial on television portrays the PS3 as a simple gaming console.

I’ve had the PS3 for 3 weeks now, and I still have not purchased a game. I download from the Sony store, I stream media from my PC using the media server option, and I watch Blu-ray movies. All of this without playing one single game. If the PS3 can functionally exist in this house without a single game, that means it can exist in anyone’s house without a single game. The sooner Sony understands that their marketting strategy needs to expand to a non-gamer demographic, the sooner they’ll see their sales figures rise.

Following up on the wild success of my other blog series ‘Sunday Night Showdown’ and ‘So I Was Wrong’, which I haven’t written in months, I decided to start a new one. Mining Minds will analyze people’s seemingly unpredictable behaviors and reactions. Examples include why people get mad at seemingly irrelevant things, or why people throw subtle and unnecessary insults into normal conversations. I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, nor do I know the difference between the two, but I firmly believe that every time a person reacts unpredictably there is no randomness involved; its an unrelated attribute or event that gets repressed, deflected, and misunderstood into a completely new behavior. These new behaviors create the same unpredictability in others, which perpetuates into a web of seemingly unintelligible web of cause and effect that becomes linear when you step back and take the personal aspect out of the analysis.

The risk here is that people don’t like to be analyzed. People want to think that they are uninfluenced by anything but their conscious, rational thoughts. But thats not the case; people react carelessly on shallow instincts that don’t take the entire situation under consideration. When these people are told that they aren’t seeing the big picture, they immediately take a defensive stance. The defensive stance is, ironically, also one of those behaviors that warrants analysis.

So what better subject to start with than my sister. She’s quite aware of her instinctual behavior and always accepts the fact that she’s being irrational and there is more to a situation than she initally considers.

Case in point, last night at the bowling alley. The Get-Along Gang decided to celebrate my birthday. For those who are unaware, the Get-Along Gang is a spicy asian mix of friends with a raging tetris addiction. We had dinner at Vietnam Palace in Chinatown, Philadelphia. Afterwards we all decided to hit the bowling alley for some adventures in cosmic bowling. We were assigned lane 8, and there were a group of South Indian kids in lane 7. Looking at their scores on their television screen would reveal that the kids elected to use their first names as their identifiers on the scoreboard. Umesh, Raj, etc. The Get-Along Gang don’t roll like that, we use our god given nicknames. Uncle DDD, Boola, Monkey/Stumpy. So our ambiguous tetris-inspired names were proudly displayed on the television screen next to the South Indian kids’ names.

A half hour goes by, and we realized that the South Indian scoreboard changed between games to use their own nicknames. Uninspiring nicknames, like ‘boobs’, but still had some playful charm. The majority of the Get-Along Gang was not affected by the South Indian movement to nicknames. However one member of the gang, the hero of this analysis, was distressed by the change.

“They want to be like us” was my sister’s warcry for the rest of the night. She gave them the old Stumpy-stare; mouth slightly agape, brows slightly furled, feet shoulder width apart to maintain balance if an altercation should occur. Her only respite came in the form of a slurp of drool dripping from her mouth due to enraged concentration.

This is a perfect opportunity to exercise a little restraint. Step back, analyze the situation, and come to the conclusion that no one meant any harm and everyone was just trying to have fun. But as I mentioned before, my sister acts on instincts. She chose to repeat herself for the rest of the night and take her discomfort with her as we left the bowling alley.

The first step that I like to take when thinking through these sorts of problems is to clean it up a bit, clear out the riff-raff so we can isolate the problem. Lets start with what we know to be true. First we can acknowledge that there are two core possibilities. Either those kids changed their display names because of our influence, or they changed their display names because of other influences. You might be wondering, “Why couldn’t they have changed their name without influence?” My answer to that is, things don’t happen without influence. NOTHING happens without being influenced by something.

The sequence of events is also known. South Indian All-Stars set their proper names and started to bowl, Get-Along Gang sets their unusual names and started to bowl, South Indian Gangstas changed their names to be equally unusual to ours. The first two events are isolated from one another. The third event is the one in question.

Lets start with the first possibility and try to identify causes for the three events. This is also my sister’s assumption and will allow us to analyze her reaction later on.

First, the Sri Lanky Turned Yankees team came in and entered their proper names. I’d like to make the assumption that these were the kids of an IT specialist from India who move over the pond for a new job 5 years ago and braught the kids with them. These names reflected their innocent ‘foreigner in a new land’ mentality of trying to be as unassuming as possible. Second, the Get-Along Gang crashed the scene and dropped some dope nameage on the screen. We did this because we bring the flavor wherever we go, there is no guessing involved here. Now comes the kicker, the Tandoori Furys change their names to be playful. Since we are stuck in the first possibility and are assuming that they changed names because of us, we can easily say that this was also caused by their cautious foreigner mentality. The Dark Warriors of the Asian Subcontinent saw some familiar non-white people expressing themselves freely and became comfortable enough to do the same.

Now lets take the other possiblity and identify causes for each event. When analyzing the second possibility, we must assume that the Get-Along Gang had nothing to do with the mid-game name changes. This won’t help us understand my sister’s anger but will provide an alternate point of view. The first and second events remain the same as they did with the first possibility. So why would they change their names on their own? Up until now, we assumed that the Kerala Impostas were well acquainted and they were all comfortable with each other. What if they weren’t friends, and just awkward bowling partners that weren’t comfortable with each other until the second game? When the second game started, the social process of friendship was far along enough as to expose their creative wills to one another, and thus the more personalized names. That provides an explaination for the third event without factoring in the Get-Along Gang’s influence.

Now that we’ve analyzed the Dravidian Villain League lets turn the microscope on my sister, the other side of the anger equation. The fourth event that was not mentioned above was ‘Sister gets angry’. She was convinced that the Get-Along Gang was ‘imitated’. What kind of people get angry when they are imitated? People who value what is being taken, namely their individuality. My sister takes pride in being unique, and she likes when other people acknowledge that, and she even likes it when people imitate that. What she hates is when she doesn’t get credit for being the source of the imitation. If the Dhosa Rolling Bowling Patrol approached my sister and verbally appreciated the use of nicknames before using their own nicknames, I can assure you that my sister would not have been upset.

There we have it. We have thouroughly analyzed my sister’s unexpected annoyance during the adventures in cosmic bowling. In reality, the conclusions that we get when trying to analyze behaviors are all factors of varing degrees. Very rarely does something that requires analysis happen for one reason alone. Hopefully the goal of all this writing has been attained, and we all try to take a step back and analyze situations before getting angry. Rise above the hate, and put yourself in everyone else’s shoes before relying on instincts to judge your position and make sure you use your anger only when necessary.

You can’t blame me, I was a confused young man who lost the only headphones he ever loved. It was a reaction to a situation that I couldn’t handle. But if I could do it all over again, I would have done the same thing.

Two weeks ago I broke my Grado SR60s. They had been with me from my college days. College sweethearts, if you will. When they left me, betrayed me, I wanted nothing to do with them. Sure, they were probably still the best headphones in the price range. Sure, I was satisfied with their performance over the time that I had them. But it was time for me to move on, sow my wild audi-oats.

So I hit the net hard, looking for a worthy replacement. Hours of research turned to days, and my search always led me back to the SR60s. Best value, best sound, best…headphones. Even my friends told me that I had something special and I was crazy to let it go. But what do they know? They’re out with different headphones every other night. The don’t know what real audio love is.

A week later I started to get desperate. I had put my hopes of a lasting relationship aside and just wanted a quick fix. I just needed to feel that pressure on my ears one time to get me through another week. It dawned on me that my dad’s Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones were still in my house. I searched my house like a celebrity out of rehab for that fix and finally found them.

The QuietComforts had been around the block. Everyone had used them at one time or another to fill their needs, and the QuietComforts play for any man who buys them a few batteries. But I was a fool if I thought that I was any different from those people. I took them out of their skimpy black case and wrapped them around my head.

It felt wrong. Partly because they didn’t have that gentle hold of my SR60s, but mostly because there was no sound. I realized that, unlike my SR60s, you had to turn these headphones on. My SR60s were always ready to play. Fortunately, turning them on was just flicking a switch.

I hit the switch and the world around me disappeared. The active noise cancelling kicked in and suddenly it was just me and the QuietComforts. I quickly found an MP3 and fired it up. The sound was loud, bassy, worn. But it was sound. I listened to those headphones all night long. The sound was not even close to the quality of my SR60s, but I didn’t care.

I woke up the next afternoon on my desk with scratches all over my chest and the headphone cord stuck between my teeth. It dawned on me that this couldn’t continue, I needed to find meaning in my headphone relationship. I hit the net with renewed purpose, and a level head. My fingers almost moved on their own as they combed the sites for a replacement. I found one…

Audio-Technica ATH-A900s. The name was a mouthful but the specs were dead sexy. Not only that, but they had sleek padded earpieces and giant cans, cans like you wouldn’t believe. I had to follow up on this possibility. I looked for opinions, looked for feedback, and looked in my own heart. All signs pointed to yes!

I went to work in DC but my mind was still at home. Every meeting, every conference call, every other minute in front of the monitor was saturated with dreams of me and my ATH-A900 romping through computer games together, dancing to MP3s together, watching movies together…dozing off together after a long night of surfing the Internet.

The dream came true when I arrived home the following Thursday. My loyal new headphones were waiting for me in a box. I took them out of the box and held them. They were firm and flexible; gentle when you slide them onto your head.

It was time; the moment was right. I turned off the lights and fired up Guns and Roses, Estranged. It was great, a mind altering experience. We listened to songs and played games for hours, only stopping to eat and stretch. The headphones were light and responsive, the sound was deep and rich.

As the night drew to a close, I couldn’t help but notice my old SR60s lying on the floor with the wire sprawled across the carpet. If they were plugged in, they’d probably be crying. A sight that once inspired hate and anger now inspired something else. I had come to terms with my SR60’s sudden break, and I realized it was my fault that they left me. I stretched the cord too far, and took its flexibility for granted. I also realized that my old friends needed help.

I picked up the phone and called up Grado. I explained my situation and asked if they could help. They said exactly what I wanted to hear, “We can fix them for $25″. It was the right thing to do, and there is no way I could regret fixing them.

The SR60s will be on their way back to the factory Monday morning, and the QuietComforts will probably never find happiness. The ATH-A900s and I have years of good sound together. Once my SR60s get back from the factory, we’ll probably enjoy a coffee together and listen to a few songs. We’ll clear up the air between us…

…Then I’ll sell em on eBay.