David’s Ramblings

“Fadelight”, the coolest new thing to hit the internet. It’ll be coming soon to a browser near you. My friend Shaine and I have joined forces as we should have years ago and are in initial stages of getting our website together. You can find a little “coming soon” page at Fadelight.com. This is not a real post, just a little nod toward what Shaine and I are working on putting together. Carry on.

The word mini in this post is somewhat ironic, as 800×600 pictures are a lot bigger than anything I type, but still, here’s my post for today, minus anything beyond pictures and a bit of explanatory text.

This is a view of Tech tower. There’s a lot of trees out in front of Tech Tower, so it’s sort of hard to get a clear shot from where I’m standing in this shot. For those not in the know, it used to be a tradition to try and steal the “T” (there are actually four, it says Tech on each side) off the tower, though this is now officially discouraged.

This here is just a typically quiet spot not too far from where I took the shot of Tech Tower. There on the right is the financial aid building… I think.

This building is visible all over campus. It’s tall. I’m not sure how tall, but it’s tall enough to impress me because I’m from Utah.

Yes. A grappling hook. Not the only odd thing in the room, but the most recent. You laugh now, but when the third floor hall is engulfed in flames you won’t be laughing so much, will you? That’s right you won’t. You’ll be screaming. Because you’re on fire. That’s the typical reaction when you’re on fire.

In order of height – library (bottom left corner), Bellsouth tower, and whatever that other one is that’s featured above. We’ll ignore the fact you can actually see two or three more buildings in there if you look.

The campanile and student center. I try to avoid this place because there’s always annoying people handing you fliers. As one comedian stated – fliers are like a person saying, “Here, you throw this shit away for me.”

There’s your little random “mini post” for the day.

There are two interesting, rant-able topics on my mind at the moment. Neither of which either of you readers wants to hear about. However, as I have not posted on my website for a while, you are forced to deal with mediocre product over no product at all.

Firstly, my friend Shaine is on a mission to find his own religious beliefs and that makes me want to discuss my own views further. Perhaps you’ll remember I wrote about my own such mission a few months ago, so I’ll try to brief and not reiterate anything I’ve previously gone over. Mainly, I’ll talk about where I am now, and how I feel about that Ð something I never really went over before.

Currently I’m pretty much a Deist. Deism is like atheism, except for believing in God. If you’ve never really understood atheism, as I was just 8 months prior, then this comparison won’t make any sense. However, if you do understand atheism, than the comparison is simple. Let me fill in those that are lost. I hope I get this right, I’m sort of still learning this stuff.

Atheism starts on the basic principle that humans have an innate sense of reason and should use it. They extend this to include religion – every person should have their own personal understanding based on their own reasoning, not a prepackaged set of beliefs.

Atheism also denies revealed religion on the basis that it’s not reasonable for someone to base their life on the blindness that is called faith, especially when that faith is simply trust placed on other people that may or may not have reason to tell the truth. Finally, and here comes the main difference between atheism and deism, atheists believe it’s unreasonable to believe in a supreme being, a creator. Deism is practically only different in that a deist believes it is reasonable to believe there was a creator.

So, simply put, I believe in God, but none of the religions on this earth that claim to speak for him. I think it is reasonable to assume that if God truly wanted people to worship him in a special way, he’d let us all know fair and square. He gave us the capability to think for ourselves for a reason. He wouldn’t want us blindly following one religion or another without at least going into it cautiously (with doubt and criticism in hand). I believe it’s appropriate to pray as a form of thanks, but asking him to do this or that is somewhat ridiculous. There you go. All of you can stop wondering what I mean when I say I’m a deist now.

Now, how does this make me feel? Well, I feel great. I have to say that I feel much better about my life than I did while I was Mormon. Being Mormon had me somewhat depressed, because I always felt like I wasn’t good enough, and there was no way I could get better. I felt completely unsure of myself or my supposed testimony, unsure that I would ever live up to what god wanted.

Sure, there’s still some uncertainty about life and how it all works, but that’s life. I can deal with that. Now I’m happier because I know that I don’t need to live up to some standard I don’t believe. I don’t need to feel obligated to give two years of my life to a cause I don’t very much believe or any other such things. It’s a freedom one can only feel when he stops sitting in the middle and finds the side that best suits him, and for me, this is the side that best suits me.

I want to leave this final note on the topic of religion: I’m constantly “evolving”. By making this radical change in my belief structure, I’ve realized that there are possibilities for change. I may very well some day find myself gravitating back toward a religion. I may find myself with a better grasp on how the world works and realize that God does want me to have some faith. I’d be a fool not to leave such things open for further review and refinement.

Now that I’ve written a billion or so paragraphs about religion, I think it’d be rude to hold you up any longer with my other rant. Let’s just say that one of the bills in Congress being pushed by the RIAA sucks a whole lot. I’ll probably post about it sometime soon, because it makes me angry and I’m likely to write about stuff when it gets me angry.

Yeah. I’m a nerd. It never hurt me to admit the truth before, but before, I just thought I was a nerd. Oh no, I was only a demi-nerd. I hadn’t yet achieved nerd status. Tonight, I claim to have crossed that threshold.

I know I’m getting all apocalyptic, but it’s true. There are certain things that signify a transition in one’s life. Sometimes, there’s no going back Ð like when you flunk out of school and become a checker at the grocery store or when you invade Iraq. I believe I’ve reached that point in nerdery. (Yes, nerdery is today’s word of the day. Use it in a conversation, impress your friends with your knowledge of fake words,)

So, I was sitting there starting to get to work on my programming assignment. It’s an easy assignment, just some basic stuff on multithreading. It may sound intimidating to the non-programmers out there, but it’s not that hard if you already know all of the other programming stuff you’re assumed to have learned before this class. In any case, I realized, as is often the case, that I didn’t want to do my assignment today when I could do it an hour before it was due Friday. What kind of sense does that make? You know how it is.

“Oh, I could do part of this assignment that is worth 90% of my grade and involves a lot of time and effort today, or I could put the entire assignment off until the end of the semester and require 2 days, a straight jacket, and hourly injections of caffeine (later Meth). The later option doesn’t sound so pleasant, but that’s way in the future. I might get hit by a car next week and die. I’d much rather die knowing I played 8 more hours of <insert favorite video game/real life activity here> than working on the assignment.” But then you don’t get hit by a car and die and so end up with the whole end of semester mess.

Now, typically this is my method for doing any assignment, but the video game tends to vary. Tonight, I played “Learn Assembly Code”. Yes. I was teaching myself assembly code. For those non-semi-nerds in the room, that’s bad. I was teaching myself how to program in one of the most painful languages possible. To understand why, look at this code:

000001010011100110101010101011111

# This code will add 1 and 1 together or something else useless.

And that’s simplified assembly, known as machine code. Real assembly has more numbers and letters too.

Now, I’ll give you a second to read the first part about avoiding homework to do something fun and the second part about teaching myself assembly again. Now note that assembly is not part of my curriculum, I was doing this for fun. Yes. Fun. And thus dies the small part of my soul I had left, leaving me able to take my true form as a Level 0xf0 Nerd with preferred skills in magic.

I’ve always known what I wanted to be when I grow up. Teaching has always had an appeal to me. The age group I want to teach moves gets older, as I continuously realize that I couldn’t stand teaching the immature people that are my age (though, with college, that’s started to taper off). The same I idea has always been there though. I’ve always liked learning, and helping others to learn what I know.

Okay, for a few months when I was 6 years old, I was disillusioned enough to think I’d want to be a farmer, but that was back before I scheduled all of my classes to be after 11 am. Man, getting up before dawn would just suck so bad. I was really stupid when I was six.

Beyond that very ignorant time of my childhood however, there has been one other secret occupational desire in my life. One I haven’t really shared until this point. Yeah, with you. Don’t you feel special?

I’ve always secretly wanted to be funny. I mean, I know I couldn’t do stand-up comedy, because I am really bad at public speaking, or even just telling jokes to my friends in a semi-public location, but writing humor Ð that has always been a secret dream of mine. I particularly love Dave Barry’s work, and have secretly desired to gain writing abilities that can take one even a tiny portion of his humor.

So when I grow up, beyond doing whatever it is I’m doing in the computer science world, I hope I can write some funny stuff about it on my blog too. There you have it.

Oh, and yeah, I know this post isn’t exactly making brilliant strides toward becoming Dave Barry. Don’t give me crap.