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November 26 Castles Made of SandThe other morning I was sitting on the train when "Castles made of sand" came on my mp3 player. It'd have to be one of my favourite Jimi Hendrix songs - I'm not really sure why, maybe it's the backwards guitar solo. Anyway, as I listened, I began to think of how the song rang true for me. Actually, I believe the sentiment is universally applicable. Think about how much you value your dreams - the thoughts and desires you've cherished, secretly, in the dark, alone, hoping against hope for their realisation. What would it mean if you lost them? Our dreams, those fantasies for which we yearn, define us, set us apart from those around us. They give our lives focus and meaning, purpose, a goal to strive for. And sometimes the achievement of that goal is not as important to us as the striving, the destination subordinate to the journey. And yet, the importance they assume in our lives is itself a danger to us - focus can become obsession, all-consuming, replacing everything else we value. At that point, we allow our future to dictate our actions in the same way as we can surrender control to the past, believing ourselves the victims of circumstance rather than masters of our own destiny. And of course, when the castles melt into the sea, the loss of something which never existed becomes critical, a disaster from which we can never recover. Buddha exhorted people to dwell in the present moment, to find peace within rather than chasing dreams. I'm no buddhist, but it may be that he was onto something there. All the same, the search for happiness aside, I still have dreams which I will continue to cherish. I've lost dreams before, and I think I'll cope with losing them again.  October 28 Ruby on Rails courseAfter playing around with Ruby for quite some time, recently I decided to try applying this to web development. A personal recommendation from a friend to use the Rails framework led me to take a look at this course: Free Online Course in Ruby on Rails I've found it to be quite good so far - there's a series of podcasts which are quite accessible, although probably not quite suited to the complete beginner. And nice to have some free tutorials out there... October 27 The peculiar predicament of what to do nextAt present, I find myself in an interesting position.I have been working for some time in our public sector, in various positions which usually have the word 'Analyst' somewhere in the title - at present I'm a 'Quantitative Analyst'. This work I find rewarding (in general) and also stimulating - there is no shortage of intellectual challenge and I like the people I work with. However, working in the place I do is not so much a matter of choice as it is of convenience. Living in Wellington, a great number of the employers are government entities, so that's mostly where I've ended up. Another choice I didn't make is which tools I use to do the job - at present I mostly use SAS (proprietary data analysis software) and MS Office (primarily Excel, also proprietary). These are good tools, and in fact they are the best available that do what they do. I use these on a Windows platform, and Windows is a good operating system, perfectly suitable for use in our office environment, but is also proprietary. Actually the fact that this is all proprietary software is the only real issue I have with this whole situation - but for me this is a real problem. I'll explain. For the last few years I have made the choice at home to use free and open-source software where possible. Why? Well, it's just the right thing to do, to my mind, to reward the community who have contributed thousands upon thousands of hours of work essentially for the public good, rather than a corporation which focuses just as many hours, if not more, to protecting their licence revenue so that they can make more money than their competition. So at home I use Ubuntu on both my computers, although one does have a Windows partition - and on Windows I have made the choice to use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice in preference to the equivalent offerings from Microsoft. Here's Stephen Fry, with a piece he contributed to the GNU birthday celebrations recently: Freedom Fry — "Happy birthday to GNU" Now this is my dilemma: while I use free software at home, at work I am completely restricted (and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future) to the use of proprietary software. While I have no qualms about the quality of the software, or concerns about its suitability for use in our environment, I do object to its use on moral grounds. The trouble is, at this point I cannot see an alternative. It may be possible to use free software in places (for example, Python and MySQL are potential candidates in the work I do) but the platform seems likely to remain Windows, at least for the moment. So in order to resolve this, I need to either a) push for a complete re-think of my employer's IT policies (yah, right), or b) find a new job where I'm not forced to use proprietary software. Ah, gee, that's going to be a tricky one...we'll see what happens - Mozilla's hiring, I see... October 25 Work/LifeIt's been a while since I've been here *blows dust off the blog pages*. Part of the reason was that my life has been very full for the last couple of years. A new baby (our second), 2 changes of job (actually, career), moving (twice), buying a house, learning new things, meeting new people...Every so often, I look back at my late teens and early twenties with vague regret, thinking of all the wasted opportunities, all the time I spent slacking - but of course that's all changed now. My days are packed so full I'm lucky if I get 5 hours sleep most nights. I spend most of my commute time with my laptop out, furiously working away, and then every other night I do the same thing at home for a couple of hours after the kids are in bed and the housework is more or less done...I'm no slacker now. Or am I? One of the guys I work with has been working between 10 and 14 hours a day during the week, and then coming in at weekends as well. He's kept this up for a few months now, on and off as our workload ebbs and flows. One of my concerns (apart from my concern for his health) is how this reflects on the rest of the team. Are we not putting in enough time? Actually, as a rule we are. We all put in a lot of hours. The thing is, when someone consistently ignores their needs and works ridiculous hours so that they can meet unrealistic deadlines, the message that sends goes something like, "We don't matter. All that matters is that you get what you want. Whatever the question, the answer is yes." Sending that message creates an expectation in the customer's mind which inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration, as overwork and fatigue leads to mistakes and unmanaged workload. So ok, I am a slacker. If slacking means I don't sacrifice my entire life to a job which is far less important than my family, then I am a slacker. Don't get me wrong, I love my job - I just don't love it enough to allow it to become everything in my life. PS Good to see you back  June 14 It's been a while......hasn't it?I have been a wee bit busy lately, not really much time to do anything significant on here, just throwing the odd comment around. I have also been spending less and less time using Windows, because (a) it's crap and (b) I just got a new laptop, which I have now installed Ubuntu on, and it is a beautiful thing. A few teething problems aside (the sort of thing you always get with Linux, finding the right drivers mostly, plus a couple of 64-bit complications), I find it to be much quicker and far less system/resource-greedy than the ugly hog OS Vista which is now a thing of the past. If anyone wants the disc they can have it (don't tell Bill though As a result though, I am considering (although I haven't completely made up my mind yet) migrating this blog somewhere a little less Microsoft-oriented. To my shame I have left my foray into wordpress untouched for months now - I don't know why I thought I could update two blogs when I hardly have the time for one. However, I think I'll leave things as they are for now, as I am feeling sleepy...
May 16 Sometimes you get the bear...Well, I am so glad this day is over. One of those I would rather forget, not that it was especially memorable. Then again, those sort of days tend to stick out in your memory...First of all, I had to spend most of the day (nigh on all of it) coding a macro in Excel. Mostly, I don't mind that sort of work, as it often poses a challenge, keeps the brain active, and VBA is mostly fairly easy to work with - well documented and reasonably straightforward to debug. Excel, on the other hand, is a delicate little flower which really doesn't cope well with any more than about 10,000 rows of data for any operation more complex than copy and paste. Which can be a problem when you try and import 35,000 rows of data and perform another 50 calculations on them. As I found out...So, as I was waiting for my macro to run to the next breakpoint, hoping (while touching wood) that I had broken the steps down to sufficiently small increments so that Excel wouldn't crash, again,  I was reminded of an "urban legend" that did the rounds a few years ago
- it's always the way, I honestly can't remember where I saw it, but
it's true  - apparently when Windows was in its infancy, the infamous "blue screen of death" (i.e. your OS has just died) was accompanied by an error message, in haiku form:Three things are certain: death, taxes, and lost data. Guess what just happened. Just then, Excel crashed. Sometimes, the bear gets you.  May 08 Talking about Learning to Fly...People are often uncomfortable with the idea of introspection - we use dismissive terms like "navel-gazing" and talk about people having their "heads in the clouds". I think possibly people who talk like that are scared of what they might face, when they face up to themselves...Quote Learning to Fly... Land of the WeirdI find this hard to credit... after all the soul-searching after Columbine, and then Virginia Tech, ABC comes up with a solution: WE NEED MORE GUNS...Of course! That's brilliant!
May 03 Family ValuesI have been really disappointed over the last few months at the disinformation and reactionary fervour surrounding the so-called "anti-smacking bill". That more or less came to a head the other day when I happened to be walking through Parliament grounds while the Destiny church was protesting against NZ Traditional Family Values in Jeopardy.I personally find it just a little disturbing that so many parents feel so strongly that they wish to hit their children. Of course, the marginally more palatable (but equally disturbing) possibility is that after the constant misrepresentation of the bill by sleazy point-scoring politicos, demagogues like Brian Tamaki may have actually managed to convince people that the bill is about taking away the rights of parents to discipline their children. Wake up, people! The bill that Sue Bradford is passing is long overdue. Parents' rights are not under threat here. What is happening is that the right of any child not to be abused (while the parent hides behind the currently legal defense of "reasonable force") is being championed. What is happening is we're saying it is no longer ok for kids to be beaten with power cords and cricket bats. We're saying we've had enough of kids being subjected to levels of violence that would be called assault when inflicted on an adult, and the perpetrators of these crimes getting away with it. I've lost count of how many times have people said in relation to the bill, "I was smacked as a child and it never did me any harm." Here's where the problem really lies - there is a fundamental disconnection between the people who are all too ready to protest any bill that outlaws smacking because they "don't see the harm in it", and the abusive cowards the bill is aimed at criminalising. The horrific violence done to our young people is jokingly referred to as a short, sharp smack. Meanwhile, the children whose welfare is at the heart of this debate have been put to one side. Politicians and media commentators who play on this discrepancy to their advantage are at best confused about the intent of the bill, and at worst are cynically uncaring. Shame on them.
May 01 The Humanist SymposiumThe first edition of the Humanist Symposium blog carnival has now been posted at Daylight Atheism.I would encourage everyone reading this to get over there and take a look - there are some brilliant essays there, promoting humanism as a positive lifestyle and an answer to those who believe that people living life without religion are somehow 'missing out'. My own post of a couple of weeks ago, Why be good? is included there, which I find quite humbling considering the quality of thought and argument that can be found in the posts making up the carnival. I won't single out any as I think you should go there and take a look for yourself, and I must admit, I'm still working my way through them all! Suffice it to say, I think I will find a lot of inspiration there for future ramblings.
April 21 ActuariesI couldn't resist this, as most people I tell what I'm doing want to know what an actuary actually does...so here's a definition, and a few pointers...An actuary is a person, who passes as an expert on the basis of a prolific ability to produce an infinite variety of incomprehensive figures calculated with micrometric precision from the vaguest of assumptions based on debatable evidence from inconclusive data derived by persons of questionable reliability for the sole purpose of confusing an already hopelessly befuddled group of persons who never read the statistics anyway! In response to "How much is two plus two?", a marketing VP will say "22"; an accountant will say "4.00"; a mathematician will say "I can demonstrate it equals 4 with the following proof ... "; an actuary will ask "What do you want it to equal?" Question: How many actuaries does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: a) How many did it take last year? b) How many do you want it to take? c) None, after credibility weighting, we have indications that the bulb is still lit. d) None, the insurance department is not allowing any modifications to the bulb at this time. e) Have any of our competitors changed bulbs yet? f) None, they prefer to leave us in the dark. g) Five: one to screw it in, and four more to estimate the length of its life before being screwed in. h) The same number that it took last year, adjusted for trending. i) Two- The Senior Actuary presents the proposal to Managment and the Junior actuary does the work. j) One- But he/she has to do battle first with Sales and Marketing over the issue. k) One- But first, it takes ten years to pass the exams. List of actuarial pick-up lines: And, my personal favourite: What does an actuary's wife do when she has insomnia? She rolls over and says, "Tell me again, darling. Just what is it you do for a living?" -Source: ACTUARIAL JOKES
April 14 Why be good?Not so long ago I had a discussion with someone who was discontented with the state of their life - in fact they were very angry about it. Their anger was all directed at the perceived source of all the trouble and wrongness in their life - in a word, God.The reason God was blamed was that this person's Christian beliefs were at the heart of their behaviour. They followed the Golden Rule (the do unto others thing), as well as all of the Ten Commandments, and yet, their life was in tatters. People mistreated them, took advantage of their good nature, they had bad luck with their investments, they had developed a stress-related disorder and their relationships were disintegrating. Now, this unfortunate person argued, I know that God has set aside a reward for me in Heaven. I know that suffering brings virtue. I know that I cannot expect life to fall into place for me. But why does it have to be so hard? What would happen if I were to renounce my beliefs and all the moral imperatives that go with them? I could act exactly as I wanted then, and maybe my life would be easier and better. My first impulse (which I'm glad I resisted) would have been to state "God doesn't exist. It is completely irrational to place blame on something which doesn't exist, so I suggest you start looking elsewhere for the reason you are unhappy with your life." The reason I hesitated to say this was because the problem this person was facing was bigger than simply a consequence of their beliefs. This is a problem which everyone faces, whatever their belief system is and regardless of whether it happens to contain a deity. Simply put, it is this: If I am good, what do I get out of it? When we are young, we are told to be nice to others, to be polite, to refrain from violence, to share our toys, to help those who need our help, to tell the truth. In other words, to be 'good'. When we are not 'good', we face a consequence which hopefully teaches us to be 'good'. When we are 'good', we are praised, which hopefully reinforces our behaviour. Of course, whether or not that works as a young child, as our powers of reasoning develop we need to be shown a rational path to realising for ourselves that it is right to behave in a certain way. We need to reach a stage in our moral development which allows us to make decisions about often complex situations without reference to a parental figure for guidance. What exactly constitutes the right way to behave can vary somewhat, depending on our cultural setting. In some places personal property is less important than sharing with the community. In one culture a casual smile between a boy and girl publicly imbues their relationship with an inappropriate level of intimacy, whereas the same smile could simply be a polite gesture elsewhere. However, certain things remain true regardless of where you are. An act which brings harm to someone is wrong, in general. To act, therefore, in a way which minimises harm (not always an easy thing to judge) is right. To act for the good of others is right. It is right in a way which is fundamental to the fabric of all society. This is a principle embodied by the words of Jesus Christ: "Love thy neighbour as thyself". (Its polar opposite has often been seen in the motto of Aleister Crowley, "Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law." Funnily enough though, Crowley intended 'what thou wilt' to be something quite different to the self-interest it has often been misinterpreted as.) The Confucian virtue expressed in the Doctrine of the Mean advocates harmony and benevolence. The Buddhist Pancasila has its followers renounce killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication. The Hindu concept of Dharma guides each individual along a path of right living at each stage of their lives. For each of these, there is a different reason to obey their particular instruction - often enlightenment, Heaven or communion with God as a reward for right behaviour, or perhaps Hell or a similar consequence for malfeasance. In the same way as the child behaves rightly to win reward or to escape punishment, the follower of religious doctrine is motivated to receive a return on their investment of good behaviour. This has the advantage of allowing the person who does not want to think about why it is right to behave this way to still live a good life. If you were to think about it, though, why would you want to act in an ethical way, if not to receive some sort of reward? The fact is that if everyone in the world consistently behaved ethically, the world would be a better place to live. We would treat each other respectfully and peacefully, and my friend would have no reason to complain about being treated badly. There is no need for the promise of Heaven or Hell after death when we can play a part in creating either here and now.
April 10 Pictures and WordsOf all the people I lost touch with when I stopped updating this blog, perhaps the one I felt worst about was Lili. If you were reading last year, you'll know I was a huge fan of her writing, and she was also a good friend.Sadly her blog is no longer on Windows spaces, but Google is a wonderful thing...I hope she doesn't mind me posting the link here ...
April 09 Coke for ChristWhat do you get when you combine a multinational company, Jesus and Italian cinema? Apparently not a PR opportunity...Jesus drinking Coca-Cola? Not this EasterOne of the more bizarre moments surrounding Easter, a holiday that has more than its share of bizarre moments...what I found funny was that Coca-Cola thought that "the use of its brand was unacceptable and could get (sic) the company a bad image". So Santa is OK, but not Jesus? I wonder if Pepsi has been watching? Opportunity knocks, people...
April 02 A curious predicamentReligion is one of those things that tends to excite a reasonable amount of controversy. I've made a couple of comments about it over the last year or so. Way of the Mind has several entries on it, as do several blogs of both religious and secular/atheist focus. Also, the usual prohibition against discussing the forbidden topics of religion and politics aside, most people have some sort of opinion on religion, whether fully formed or not.The thing that always strikes me is, what's the problem with discussing religion? Is there actually anything to disagree over? Well, on the face of it, yes. In fact, there are a great number of religious texts and tracts, quite apart from the obvious ones (the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad-Gita, etc.) which make a great number of claims to knowledge of God, or mystical experience, or divine inspiration. Most of which are contradicted at some point by one of the others. Or by itself , a point wittily exposed by the experiment on Way of the Mind. Or by anyone who cares to say, "You know what? That's a nice story but I think you made it all up." But there's where the argument then gets strange. Because it's not like an argument about scientific theory, where one can appeal to quantitative evidence to demonstrate the truth or otherwise of the assertion. The religious writer claims to have knowledge of the divine, which s/he has received by divine inspiration or guidance. Now clearly for the writer it's not a problem that there's no proof. There's no need, just as there wasn't for Saul on the road to Damascus or John in the grip of revelation. For them, the "truth" is clear. It can just be a problem for the rest of us, who weren't privileged to receive the same blast of inspiration. It's not like an argument over something fluffier either - say like mathematics (yes, actually, maths can be very fluffy) or economic theory or ethics or even aesthetics. There, an argument, in order to be convincing, must first demonstrate soundness. In order to demonstrate that, one must first examine the assumptions which form the basis of the argument. What can we take as axiomatic? Merely this: what any reasonable person would most probably agree with, given the chance (yes, even in maths this is the case). So what are the assumptions of, say, Catholic theology? How about the virgin birth for instance? Or the resurrection of Jesus? Or we could start with the truly basic assumption common to a whole lot of religions (but granted, not all), the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity? Now without dwelling on the problems that arise out of that last assumption (and there are many of them), and without challenging the soundness of the arguments which follow from the rest, this is where I lose interest in continuing the argument. Because these are assumptions I disagree with. Not that I reject; that's a little too strong a statement. I merely question the reasonableness of any of these assumptions. I am open to their truth; I would be very keen to see any form of proof, other than an appeal to faith. Once that happens, there's something to argue over.
April 01 Study PlanYes, exciting times - tonight I sat down to revisit my study plan for the next few months. I know, I know, you can probably hardly contain your excitement.Anyway, assuming you've calmed down enough to read on, I had already done the first part, which was to sort out exactly what I needed to study. This was the easy part - I have the course notes, I know the topics I need for the exams coming up (in September), and now it's just a matter of putting them all together in a nicely laid out plan. The tool I wanted to use for this, as opposed to the pre-built calendar in the absolutely awful M$ Outlook (I have to use it for work but I flat-out refuse to install it at home) was Excel, as it has a lot of nice calendar functions and it's possible to do some nice interactive things in it. While I was getting ready to do this, I thought, why not look for a template? There is no doubt one out there which would be suitable, or at least modifiable to suit what I need. As it turns out, not really. Not terribly surprising in a way, but nothing that wasn't either designed with entirely the wrong purpose in mind, or just really ugly and not worth the time of installing. Anyway, something which happened while I was downloading a template struck me as worth commenting on. If you're not familiar with VBA, this could possibly throw you a little. There's a way to personalise the Excel start-up so that it comes set up the way you want it - basically, you just record (or write) a macro to specify what needs to be where and then save it as Workbook_Open() in a module in your Personal.xls workbook. For instance, this is the macro I have saved in mine: Sub Workbook_Open() Now this is a fairly simple thing - all it asks Excel to do is to set the Zoom on the page to 80% and to make the Standard, Formatting, Control Toolbar, Formula Auditing, Task Pane and External Data toolbars (which I tend to use fairly frequently) visible. So not too complicated. Feel free by the way to use this code if you would like to. Anyway, when I downloaded a template from M$ Office Online, I ended up with a run-time error, which asked as it usually does for the user to either end the macro or to debug it. I chose to debug as I had a fair idea what was going on; a less experienced user might have ended, or even shut down Excel in fright. Anyway, this is one of those traps to look out for when you start customising programs like Excel: sometimes files (particularly templates) will have their own set-up routines or other macros, which can conflict with ones like the above. In this case it was a case of "a toolbar too far", and so I just commented out the offending line (the Control Toolbox toolbar) and let it run on. And after all that, I didn't use the template. So what did I do? Just a quick and dirty autofill down the leftmost column and a note in the next two for each of my courses. I may format it in a nicer way later on if I feel like it and have the time. Works for now.
March 31 In case you missed it...The feed on the right from Barking Dog is my new incarnation, mostly (well, actually, completely so far) updated from Ubuntu.The main difference between the two from a content perspective would be that here I tend to stick to rants and ramblings and questions of belief and other blather about life in general, whereas there I intend to contain it more neatly to the more technical side of my interests. That's the idea, anyway - it may be that I will end up moving to one or the other, but not for a while yet....
March 30 He's Back...Yes, it's true - not only is he back (sort of) keeping up with this ol' space thing, he's also succumbed to the truly awful habit of speaking about himself in the third person. Of course, that is going to stop immediately.Hopefully, though, I'll manage to contribute regularly here once again. I was away for quite some time, mostly because there was a new baby in my life (I have two little girls now, it's sooo cool :D), and partly also because other areas of my life became quite busy. I started playing a text-based mmorpg called Marcoland also(which didn't help with the time commitments), but more about that later. I've also picked up other computer-related interests, in particular programming in C/C++ and a few other languages, which is a nice wee hobby, and very suitable for a geek like me. Keeps me out of trouble anyway. If it sounds like I'm trying to make excuses for not updating my space, then I sort of am...I feel a little guilty as I did sort of leave without so much as a goodbye, which is not very good. I see there are a few people I remember still blogging away, which is cool, so I plan to pop in and say hi on a couple of spaces over the next few days, and maybe also apologise abjectly. Btw if you feel like you deserve an apology, just put a comment below with an indication of how badly I've treated you. I'm sorry. (That was an apology in advance.) Take care and have fun.
June 01 Talking about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - God Is In The House - The Mercy Seat (Live)
I just had to put this in here... Lili put this in her blog the other day, and it reminded me of times spent early on with a good friend who remains a friend to this day... a wasted youth is never truly wasted. |
Why didn't someone think of this earlier?
Lili now has a photo-blog 
I have also been dabbling in Linux, and a few months ago I took the plunge, partitioned my hard drive and installed 
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