Society of Loki
This is turning out to be another weekend.
- Thursday: Swung by old workplace to put together spec for backup solution: Shuttle box with 6 terabytes of disk stuffed inside, running Linux. About $800, fairly portable and flexible. Again reminded that Psychology people feel more like real people than CS people do. Not real in the sense of "this is how most people live, going to bars and not thinking a whole lot" but more "genuinely human even if academically minded". This is probably one of those "the grass is always greener" things though.
- Friday: Into debugging phase of my big project at work, looking forward to having it entirely done. Interrupted by need to prepare a demo for one of my bosses to present on Monday, also need to shut down machine room for GHC scheduled power outage. Then, a trip to the lonliness-in-a-crowd experience at the CS Friday socials. Sigh.
- Saturday: Problems with a malfunctioning front door lead to brief social gathering with upstairs neighbours and screwdrivers and disassembly of door locking mechanism. Trip to work to revive machine room, failed attempts to rebalance the power on the UPSs (will need to eventually get this right). Southside: Buying new foreign events journals, Beehive to have some tea and ice cream. Sketched a bit, read a bit, did some more stuff for work. Crowded busses: must be a sporting event of some kind. On my usual walk to downtown to catch a bus (which often leads to a few hours of wandering the area if I'm feeling restless), I passed a café with a most unimaginative name, 「Café du Jour」, which also had such delicious smells floating out the door that I stepped in and bought a sandwich to go - would've loved to have sit but depression has taken my appetite mostly away for the last few days. Feet eventually take me on more wandering, then downtown, then a bus takes me back home. Discovered auto-tune the news.
- Today: Stomach declared neutrality again, downed the delicious sandwich. Spent a few hours upgrading my apartment from 「filthy」 to 「dirty」 and moving some things I've regularly stubbed my toes on for the last few months. All of this while the darker of Fiona Apple's music plays. May head out to another teahouse to burn more hours and maybe sketch a bit.
http://www.killawattplus.com/?gclid=CMTAkOTojZ4CFUpK2godph0oow
might be handy if your machines are drawing less than 15 amps each.
What does "genuinely human" mean?
By genuinely human, I mean that general academes either never went as far or never went as all into the particular experiments of geek culture, and their interactions match up better with human nature (less with a particular idealised-by-a-CS-person human nature).
I think for an older geek, there's difficulty in being around younger geeks (a lot of the giving up on the younger experiments are of the sort: "I realied that what I was doing was ***** stupid and naïve") as well as being around non-geeks. I've generally found philosophy-minded people to be a good direction for older geeks - there's still the idea that understanding society from the outside and as mechanistic is worthwhile, but a commitment to a higher level of dialogue and less impetus to quickly reach conclusions about the (ideal or real) nature of humanity. Unfortunately, philosophy geeks are very rare.