#life
34 posts tagged life. All tags
Breaking Down an NAA ID / World Wide Name
As a storage engineer I get handed a world wide name and asked to find the disk. Here is how to dissect an NAA ID into OUI and vendor fields, with the specific quirks of NetApp, EMC, Engenio, and HDS.
Electronic Cigarettes for Smoking Cessation
After failing to quit smoking with Chantix, patches, gum, and everything else, I switched to an electronic cigarette and stopped calling myself a smoker. My experience, the vaping community, and the health reasoning behind it.
Too Smart for your Own Good
Smart enough to coast, not driven enough to do anything with it. An honest look at the gifted-program kid who used his gifts mostly to be lazy, and is still paying for the pride that came with them.
Friendship
My definition of a friend, why I have cut so many people loose over the years without much regret, and why some of my best friends are people I first met online. Being told I am difficult to be friends with is fair.
The Butterfly Effect
How one offhand choice can quietly set the rest of your life in motion. A friend likes to credit himself for everything in mine because he got me playing WoW, and annoyingly, he is not wrong.
Cassandra and Dirk
My blog makes me sound like a miserable cynical bastard, so for once I drop the act. A plainly sincere thank-you to my girlfriend Cassandra and my dog Dirk, the two reasons I am actually happy.
Vonnegut on Style
My favorite author left behind seven rules for writing with style, so I grade my own blogging against each one, in public, and ask you how I am doing.
Passion and Inspiration.
Obama's acceptance speech actually got to me, sappy as that sounds, and got me thinking about the line between passion and inspiration. Mostly about how to fight for something without letting passion curdle into anger.
Fulfillment is?
A reader asked what fulfillment actually means, so I tried to work it out while feeling pretty unfulfilled myself. The honest answer is I am probably just a glass-half-empty person who would complain no matter what.
The American Dream
Why am I so unhappy just being content? A jaded, somewhat bleak picking-apart of the American Dream, and why a comfortable life I know is good still feels like one I would rather quit.
Life Sucks, Then You Die
A gloomy walk through the whole arrangement: school, work, retirement, death, and how we sell our labor back to the companies whose stuff we are working to afford. I do not have a fix, just the bleak math of it.
Why do I write?
Four months in, twenty visitors a day, and the philosophy posts I care about get no traffic while the tech post I like least gets all of it. Wondering aloud whether this blog is worth continuing.
Developing a career and managing change.
At 26 with a self-made career, here is the advice I would give: do what you are good at instead of chasing dreams, go to college, never stop learning, stay replaceable, and embrace change rather than fear it.
You're so unique, you're the same.
Khakis, an IT job, a townhouse, Old Navy. I am about as normal as they come on the outside, which is exactly why uniqueness is a state of mind, not eye shadow and all-black outfits.
Living in digital worlds
After years of MMOs and finally quitting them, the thing I notice most is how players rationalize the time, the friendships, and their loyalty to one game. Quit, and you get written off like an ex-addict by your old guild.
Fabricating reasons to hate people
How one petty grievance with a roommate, like a sink of dishes, quietly multiplies into a list of reasons to resent someone you actually like. On the parallels to real prejudice, and why I just ignore it instead of speaking up.
Making a bad situation worse
On grudges, sulking, the silent treatment, and isolating yourself at the party you could have just enjoyed. I'm guiltier of all of it than most, and I know it never helps anything.
Managing your online identity
I spent years trying to stay invisible online, then started a blog under my real name anyway. Where I landed on what to expose, what to keep private, and why the rule is mostly just don't be stupid.
Is there a God?
The obligatory philosophy-blog post on whether God exists. I work through a few definitions, land on no for all of them, and admit that as a man of science the big bang sounds better to me than a creator.
Presentism and Imagination, Depression
Your brain fills in the unknown past and future using how you feel right now, which is why a bad mood makes everything look bleak. Whether knowing about this trick is any use against depression is the part I'm not sure about.
Hi, How are you?
We ask how are you dozens of times a day, lie about the answer, and do not care to hear the truth anyway. A defense of brutal honesty over social graces, from someone who is a hypocrite about it at work.
Staying Organized in a Digital World
An obsessive's tour of how I keep bookmarks, calendars, contacts, email, music, and photos in sync across far too many computers and two iPhones. It mostly works, but the seams still show.
iPhone Madness
Buying an iPhone 3G on launch day, the three-hour line, and the activation mess that killed two phones when I tried to port numbers. My defense for picking one up, since it was cheaper than the GPS unit I wanted anyway.
Truth with respect to art
A web designer wrote that the future of design rests on Christian truth. I take apart the same question from the other side: truth and art are both subjective, and art owes truth nothing.
Maslow's Needs and Gaming
Why games, and MMORPGs especially, are so easy to sink into: mapped against Maslow's hierarchy, they quietly satisfy nearly every need a real life would. I've been addicted myself, so this isn't me judging from above.
Anti-Social Society
I am, by my own admission, a selfish anti-social asshole who turns down every invitation and then enjoys himself whenever forced to go. An attempt to figure out why, with a detour through brussels sprouts and psychological egoism.
The Sentence
A book on happiness got me thinking about the one trait that sets us apart: we think about the future. It is also, conveniently, the source of my own depression.
Go play a real guitar...
Everyone asks why I do not just play a real instrument instead of Guitar Hero. My answer: gaming is a waste of time, but so is everything else you do after work, and the plastic guitar is no sillier than a plastic steering wheel.
Am I Too Trusting?
I never lock anything, and one day I left a car full of laptops and my wallet sitting unlocked outside a Wawa with the windows down. A look at whether I have been lucky or just foolish.
Naps are Super Good.
A wholehearted defense of the afternoon nap against everyone who keeps telling me to cut it out. As it happens, the research — and Edison, Einstein, and Churchill — are on my side.
What's so bad about cubicles?
Everyone loves to mock the cubicle drone, but mine is a roomy, private, pretty pleasant place to work. A defense of the cube, and of the IT guys everyone assumes have it easy.
Windows Vista, It Doesn't Suck
A year on Vista, including a regretted downgrade back to XP, convinced me the hate is overblown. The case for 64-bit Vista from someone who actually used it, UAC complaints and all.
Online behavior, hiding behind the keyboard
A field guide to the kinds of people who argue online and how the keyboard turns everyone into a tough guy. I sort them into types, then admit I'm two of the worse ones.
Do I really use the internets?
I have been online since AOL 1.0 and consider myself a power user, yet I never send email and skip Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace entirely. Wondering whether I actually use the social web, or just lurk it as an introvert.