Reddit is the ultimate time waster. It’s a never-ending stream of new content, which means a never-ending sequence of small instant gratifications. It’s incredibly diverse, so you’ll never get oversaturated on one subject. As you plow through the links, it’s easy to feel like you’re accomplishing something, watching the link numbers tick up as you go to the next page over and over. And on each and every link, there are dozens or hundreds of comments.

The comments on Reddit are usually funny, often insightful (owing to the huge variety of people in various fields who use the site), and incredibly numerous. It’s easy to spend five or ten minutes on the comment section of each link, and those minutes add up. But I feel like the most insidious part of them is the false sense of community they give you.

For years I was always involved in some online community. For a long time it was the bulletin boards for Dark Basic and BlitzBasic. Then it was the D newsgroups. But after I quit those a couple years ago, there’s been a bit of a void, one which Reddit managed to fill up. I made thousands of comments on all sorts of topics. I had arguments, I reminisced about nostalgic crap, I made jokes, I got all sorts of interesting and funny and stupid responses. It felt just like the old times.

But there was one thing that was missing: an actual sense of community. I realized after a while that most of the people who I responded to and who responded to me, I had never seen and would never see again. This is unavoidable on a site as big as Reddit; when you frequent subreddits with half a million subscribers, it’s statistically unlikely that you’ll get to know any of them in any meaningful capacity.

And this is exactly what made me quit using it. I realized it’s all fake. All of this time and effort reading and making posts, trying to convince people in arguments, sharing memories, making jokes — it all ultimately meant nothing because I had no idea who any of these people were. Sometimes I’d tag someone with the Reddit Enhancement Suite if we seemed to have something in common, then not see them again for three months until I ran into them randomly on a thread about a completely separate topic and couldn’t remember who they were. In some ways this kind of anonymity is great; I’ve seen some real heart-wrenching stuff on Reddit, things that people would never say if their account were tied to their real name or if the community was smaller or more tight-knit. But as for an actual sense of community, a sense of getting to know one another, a sense of growing together? There’s none of that.

So with the help of LeechBlock, a great addon for Firefox, I’ve managed to break my Reddit habit. This means, of course, that I’m in search of an actual community to become a part of. I don’t know where.

It wastes time. Unless you’ve memorized the locations of every food in the store, and prepared a list of exactly what you need beforehand, you’ll waste time running around trying to find things. You waste time walking a half mile zig-zag through the enormous warehouse-sized store. You waste time waiting in line at the deli or the meat counter to put in your order. You waste time waiting for a cashier. You waste time waiting for them to pass each of your dozens of items individually over a scanner. You waste an entire two fucking hours driving to the place, finding a parking spot, shopping, driving home, and putting it all away.

It wastes energy. Hundreds of feet of brightly-lit open-faced refrigeration units dumping cold air all over the place. Dozens of freezer cases whose doors are opened every five minutes (and even open-faced freezers — what?!). Thousands of bright lights needed to light up a space that vast. Music playing out of a hundred speakers. Floor polishers to clean the acres of tiles. An enormous parking lot filled with streetlights.

It wastes food. Mountains of produce, baked goods, meat, thrown out every day because of their short shelf life, because they got moldy, because people poked the packages open, because people dropped them. People leaving cold/frozen goods in random spots in the store because they were too lazy to go put them back. Squashed boxes, dented cans, popped bags, broken jars. Theft. Family-sized containers of food bought by singles and couples and half of it goes bad before it can be used, but there are no smaller options.

It wastes materials. A dozen plastic bags on each trip, unless you’re environmentally-conscious and use your reusable bags. Then each food is individually packaged in plastic bags/wraps, inside paperboard boxes (or inside both!), in glass and plastic jars and bottles. All of that gunk, easily 80-90% of my weekly kitchen waste output, just to transport the food to my home.

It wastes people. People who do nothing but dump produce neatly into bins. People who take your deli/meat/seafood order, measure it out, and give it to you, over and over and over. People who sweep and mop. People who open boxes and put things on shelves. People who swipe items over a scanner all day. People who put things in bags and push carts around. This is really, really banal bullshit. With grocery store profit margins as razor-thin as they are, why are we wasting money employing people doing things that could either be replaced by a computer/machine or would not be necessary if we didn’t have a big space with people tromping around inside it?

It even strains social boundaries. A family has to buy a lot of food, but when you have four kids under age 10 you can’t afford to have a babysitter over every time you make your two-or-three-hour shopping run. So you bring them with you. Now you have four screaming, running, excitable kids bored out of their skulls as you drag them through aisle after aisle, pawing at everything at eye-level, knocking things off shelves, putting things in the cart you don’t want them to, making a nuisance of themselves. Now multiply that by 20 or 30. No one wants to deal with that kind of annoyance from ONE kid, let alone a hundred, and yet every time you go, you have this inflicted on you by all the families there.

This is all very fucking stupid.

Here’s what I’m thinking of as a replacement:

No more big open store where you walk around. Instead all the food (most? I’d still like produce and meat visible) is kept in a warehouse. The only public part of the store is a sort of café. You walk in, and there are some counters where you can get a snack or some coffee or whatever, maybe even simple deli-style food. Then you go have a seat at one of the dozens of touchscreen computer terminals, munch on your snack, and pick out everything you want through a computer interface. You wait 15-20 minutes for them to fill your order in the back, where they simply walk around (or hell, with enough automation, even robots on tracks could do this), pack your food into boxes, and bring them to a pickup area. Grab your stuff and go. That’s it. All the food is RFID-tagged and inventory management is automatic.

Don’t have time to do it in person? Just do it online instead. Keep a list of stuff you need on the internet. Access it from your computer or smartphone. Put in the order, drive down to the store, get there in time to pick it up, and go. Don’t even have time to pick it up? Pay a nominal fee and have it delivered locally to your house instead.

From there, we can then work on solving the packaging problem. Food can be packaged in standardized sizes and containers. The containers can be made sturdier but also reusable. You can bring the containers back to the store (or have them picked up when they deliver) where they can be washed and reused. Bringing the containers back gives you a little savings, just enough to make you feel like you’re getting a reward for the (relatively minor) task. Manufacturers win too; they no longer have to design and print their own packaging, and it’s cheaper to reuse the containers over and over rather than paying for new materials.

It saves time. It saves energy. Food isn’t wasted. Only as much as is actually needed is made or ordered. Far fewer people are needed to run and maintain this place, and those who are there are doing actually useful jobs.

All this stuff is doable now. Why isn’t this already happening?

I don’t want a “job.” I don’t want to be beaten down by this shitty system that rewards connections and subversion and loopholes and whose goal is profit and individual power and not the betterment of mankind. I don’t want to be glad that I have a minimum wage job that demands unwavering loyalty but returns none. I don’t want to have a salaried position that makes me work 50 or 60 hours a week with little to no vacation time, where I have no job security because my job could be outsourced or I could be deemed too expensive next to some college grad who they can pay half as much. I don’t want any part of big publicly-traded corporations who are more loyal to their shareholders than to their employees and customers. It’s why I don’t, and likely never will, invest my money in any kind of market. It leaves an awful taste in my mouth to think that my money would be put to use negatively affecting myself and others through anticompetitive business practices and government lobbying. For what? For the hope that maybe I’ll end up a little bit richer in the long run?

I don’t want to have to worry about what would happen to me, financially, if I got in an accident or if I were diagnosed with some awful medical condition. I don’t ever want to be placed in a situation where I have to choose between having a place to live and having medicine that keeps me alive. I don’t want to live in a world where medical technology which benefits us all is treated as a means of financial gain; where naturally-occurring DNA sequences can be patented; where the prices of life-saving drugs can be artificially inflated to the point where only the most affluent can afford them.

I don’t want to be told that life isn’t fair. I’ve found the people who say that are usually the exact same people who make life unfair for others. I don’t want to have to walk on eggshells every time I want to show my boyfriend affection. I don’t want to live in a world where people can say that I deserve to be treated as a second-class citizen or worse for who I am and those people have widespread support. I don’t want to live in a world where ancient myths and magical thinking are allowed and even respected in the public discourse. I don’t want to live in a world where states pass laws that allow bullying and “self-defense” and all manner of horrible transgressions of others’ rights in the name of “religious freedom.” It disgusts me to my core that I live in a world where a man like Rick Santorum can be a legitimate candidate for the presidency of the United States.

I am watching this big fucking game that is real life play out, and I’m supposed to want to play it, but I don’t want any part of it. I never have. I’ve never wanted a desk job or to deal with insurance or to have a car or to do my taxes. I don’t want to live in a country where the social and political atmosphere is one of fear of the unknown, resistance to change, and distrust of intelligence. I’m not proud of my country and I feel like there’s nothing I can do to make it better but wait for the old guard to die off. And I can’t bury my head in the sand, go “la la la”, get a job, and pretend like this bullshit isn’t happening. I just can’t ignore it.

I feel like I was born a few centuries too early, and it frustrates me to know that we can live better than we do now, but I don’t see any way to make it a reality in my lifetime. How much can I realistically do? No, really; “being the change you want to see in the world” only goes so far. I’m doing my part. I can’t make tens of millions of rednecks and old fucks and bible thumpers see that I’m just a normal fucking person and not some inhuman scum that deserves to die. I can’t completely replace the entire aging infrastructure of my country, or replace even a part of it, or come close to getting through the bureaucracy it would take to even start doing something like that. I can’t fix our corrupt government where laws are written by corporate lawyers, are passed by millionaire legislators, and are enforced by agencies composed of casts of characters who cycle in and out of the very corporations that wrote the laws.

I don’t want to live here, in this time. I’m sick of it. I’m envious of Fry. I want to fall into a cryogenic locker and wake up a thousand years in the future.

Fuck.

And yet, I can’t stand most of them. It’s not like “eh I’d rather be eating something else,” it’s more like “oh god get this out of my face.” A whole rainbow of disgusting, bitter, acrid flavors fills my mouth and I wonder why anyone would want to inflict such a thing on their taste buds. I literally have to fight my gag reflex when eating some vegetables.

I thought this would change as I got older, and while many of my tastes have changed, my opinion of vegetables is the same as it was when I was ten.

Here’s a listing of vegetables I can’t stand:

• Asparagus
• Beets
• Sweet/Bell peppers (ruin everything they touch)
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Celery (ruins everything it touches)
• Collard greens
• Kale
• Legumes of any kind; beans, peas, whatever. Gag reflex time. Only exception is the beans in chili
• Mushrooms, all kinds
• Radishes
• Any kind of squash. Oh god gag reflex.
• Sweet potatoes, blugh
• Turnips
• Water chestnuts
• Zucchini

Vegetables that I’ll eat but I’m not gonna go out of my way to get:

• Eggplant, in certain preparations (just baba ganoush and eggplant parmesan, really)
• Onions (NOT red), in small amounts, in certain preparations — better cooked than raw, better as a flavoring than as a vegetable in itself
• Parsnips (mashed with potatoes, not baaad)

And lastly the very short list of vegetables that I actually *enjoy*:

• Artichokes
• Broccoli (mmm)
• Brussels sprouts (mmmm)
• Cabbage
• Corn
• Cucumbers
• Green beans (mmm)
• Potatoes
• Spinach (fresh spinach salad oh god)
• Tomatoes (mmmmmmMMMMM)

I’ve yet to find a supermarket that carries tomatoes or spinach that are worth a damn. The quality of Brussels sprouts is hit or miss. Artichokes and corn on the cob are seasonal, though canned/frozen corn is alright. Cabbage is annoying to prepare. At any given time of the year, that leaves me with broccoli, corn, cucumbers, green beans, and potatoes.

It gets boring.

I want to eat more vegetables. But most of them taste like ass. Maybe they should stop doing that.

One of the things Dreamhost has is a way to easily install some common software packages, such as Trac. I’ve used Trac for years over on Dsource and I’ve grown to like it. So I was happy to find out I could host my projects/wikis on my own site.

Well there’s a problem: the default one-click Trac install is .. messed up.

So when you do a Trac install on Dreamhost, it creates two directories: one in your home directory that contains the actual Trac source and CGI files, and another in the domain directory of your choice that holds the configuration, database, files etc. etc. etc. There’s a problem, though. It installs the source for Trac 0.11.4, but when you actually look at the newly-created page, you’ll notice this:

Notice that the welcome page says it’s 0.11.4, just like the source. But the page was generated by 0.11.1.

Why does this happen? Because despite installing the 0.11.4 source to your home directory, there is an installation of 0.11.1 in /usr/lib that it uses instead.

Wat.

I can’t fathom why this is. Why does this matter? Because when I tried to set up the Account Manager Trac plugin, I started getting strange errors like this: http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/8684 Namely, when I logged in, I’d get a stack trace with the error “‘Environment’ object has no attribute ‘secure_cookies’.” This is caused when you try to use Account Manager with a version of Trac before 0.11.2, since secure_cookies was added in that release.

Okay, so how do you fix this? It’s actually not that hard. All you have to do is build/install 0.11.4 in your home directory, and modify your PYTHONPATH to point to it. Here’s what I did.

First, in your home directory, create a directory chain ~/lib/python2.5/site-packages. This is going to be where you install 0.11.4 to.

Second, change to ~/domain_com_tracname_trac (won’t be called that, it’ll use your domain name and the name of the Trac install you gave). This is the directory with the 0.11.4 source in it, and also where the cgi-bin directory resides (in which are the entry points for the CGI server). First open up setup.cfg in vim or something, and add the following:

[easy_install]

install_dir = /home/yourusername/lib/python2.5/site-packages

Save and exit. Now run “./setup.py build” followed by “./setup.py install”. It should install to that directory.

Okay, now you have 0.11.4 installed to the right place. Now you have to make Python see it. Change into your domain where you installed Trac (for me, it’s ~/jfbillingsley.com/tracname). There should be an index.fcgi file there, if you used FCGI during the install. Open it. Right after the “export TRAC_ENV” line, you’re going to add another export, for PYTHONPATH this time.

export PYTHONPATH=”/home/yourusername/lib/python2.5/site-packages”

Save and exit. One more thing before we try this out: there are some commandline tools like trac-admin which were installed by setup.py as well, but your PATH is still pointing to the server-wide 0.11.1 ones. So open up ~/.bash_profile and add this export:

export PATH=${HOME}/lib/python2.5/site-packages:$PATH

And then do a “source ~/.bash_profile”. A “which trac-admin” should now point to the one in your home directory.

Last, but not least, see if there’s already an FCGI process running for your Trac site. Do a “ps aux” and look for a “/usr/bin/python ..blahblah.. /cgi-bin/trac.fcgi”. Do a “kill -9 <thatprocess>”.

Now load up your Trac site. It should now say 0.11.4 at the bottom. Yaaaaay! And now Account Manager works, yaaaaaay!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

I’m not talking about our “purpose” in a religious context. I’m talking about here, on Earth, what are we trying to do? With all our technology and our social structures, what is it we’re trying to accomplish?

I don’t think we really have a goal. We really aren’t all that different than we were 2,000, 4,000, 6,000 years ago. Most of us still just want to “settle down and have a family.” But to what end? So your children can settle down and have a family too? Ad infinitum? Boooriiiing. I want to go to space, goddammit.

It seems to me that we have nearly seven billion people on this planet, all with their own goals and all trying to make their own life. Most of these goals are selfish, in that people only want what’s best for them, instead of what’s best for everyone. Sometimes these goals are contradictory between people, and then conflict arises, and then we end up with poverty and slavery and war and all these other nasty things.

What if we just stopped doing this “me first” shit? I’m not saying “sacrifice personal freedom,” at least not entirely. But can you imagine what we as a species could accomplish if we had some goal? Look at what the USA did in the mobilization effort for WWII. That was just a single country in preparation for wartime. In a decade we went from the post-Depression era to the most prosperous period in our history. And all the technology and knowledge we had gleaned from that period is incredible. In that case, the motivator was war, though a seemingly much more clean-cut war than the kinds of wars we’ve been fighting ever since. What if we had another, better motivator?

I have no idea how we would even begin to set any of this in motion. How do you convince a planet full of people that some certain course of action is the best one?

blahblahblah

Keep in mind though that I built a new desktop cause my old one, well, died. I’m not sure what exactly caused the failures, or if it was just an incredible coincidence, but keep it in mind. I haaaaave~

• Motherboard: this one is the biggest gamble since, if three things failed in a row, it might well be the mobo. But you could be lucky! It’s a Gigabyte M61P-S3. It’s socket AM2 (Athlon 64 X2/FX). Got all the standard motherboardy stuff. Just one PCIe x16. Has an IDE channel, if you’ve got some old drives. May have a slightly quirky SATA controller, I’ve always been suspicious of it. Uses DDR2 800 RAM.
• CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4600+. Solid chip, I’ve always been pleased with its performance. Stock cooler. It’s still plugged into the mobo since I don’t wanna get the thermal goo all over everything. You can have the CPU and mobo together if you want, that’ll probably be easier.
• GPU: EDIT: OH SHIT I just noticed this has two burst caps on it. D: XFX GeForce 8600 GT. Good enough to run Fallout 3 at okay-ish settings at an acceptible framerate. SLI compatible. Dual DVI + S-Video (lol) out.
• PSU: Antec TruePower Trio 430W. This is the other part that might be a gamble — a faulty PSU can cause things to fail too. But it’s never made any sounds/smells/etc. and the outputs always looked fine in the BIOS. Give it a shot?
• Case fans: Both Cooler Master, one 120MM, one 80MM. Not particularly quiet but they do their job.

I’m looking to build a PC for $1000 MAX (considerably less is welcome). Not a gaming rig but not an email machine either. Quiet is a big plus. Something with reasonable graphics performance (and dual-head is a MUST), a respectable CPU, and 4-8GB of memory. Don’t need a lot of storage, 500GB is probably more than I’ll ever need. Optical, sure, but probably don’t need bluray. Don’t really need a lot of expandability so a smaller case is preferred. I have an ATX case that I could use whose PSU and fans could probably stand to be replaced, but if you can find an awesome case that comes with those then that’s fine too.

I’m sure SOMEONE who’s reading this would love to put together a list of parts for something like this. Halp?

A few years ago, back when the PittGeeks forums still existed, someone asked what everyone had been doing during a school break. I responded that I had been working on MiniD. To that, someone else, who will go unnamed, said to me something along the lines of “why would you spend your time making another scripting language? It’s like drawing lines in the sand: it might be fun, but it’s not going to get you anywhere.” This enraged me. My long-delayed response to his question is the subject of another post.

In yet another post, I attempted to understand why I often avoid trying new things, and concluded that it’s my fear of failure that paralyzes me. I resolved to try things when I thought I would fail. Instead of taking my own advice, however, this past year has seen me sink to a new low in productivity and motivation. I have made virtually zero progress on any of my personal interests, and after two semesters and a summer of “research” in grad school, I’ve also given that up. I spend most of my time obsessively refreshing websites and chatting, and occasionally watching a TV series.

A few months ago I joined the Minecraft craze. I played obsessively for a week or two, building a house on a flat-topped mountain, spelunking enormous caverns for resources, building a little minecart system between my home base and my mining operation, smacking cows and pigs and chickens and sheep around.. and then I stopped. Being the pseudo-philosopher that I am, I somehow managed to turn a mindless game into some kind of existentialist investigation on the futility and pointlessness of existence, how the real world isn’t really any different from this sandbox with no goal, no winning condition. I had a pretty down week after that.

Tying it together. I shoot down every idea, every opportunity. It’s this “amazing” skill I have, and I have so many ways of justifying my inaction. The most insidious of these justifications is that we really are living in a sandbox with no goal, that everything we do is just drawing lines in the sand, and that ultimately nothing we do really matters. While it’s true, it’s an uncomfortably pessimistic viewpoint and it really depresses me. And that depression is what ultimately prevents me from doing anything. I have nothing to work towards since I know it’s all fake and put-on anyway. I find it difficult to enjoy things when I know they have no purpose, when they’re really no different than stacking blocks in a 3D computer simulation. I never really understood what “ignorance is bliss” was talking about until now.

This past year has been pretty joyless for me, aside from a few bright spots here and there. Well, I’m tired of being depressed. There’s no way I can ignore the truth about our lack of purpose in this universe, but I feel like that shouldn’t prevent me from living a happy life anyway.

One of the bright spots this year is that I’ve met someone whom I care about very much, and in discussing this with him last night, he told me that rather than doing things because they serve some purpose or because I feel like I should, that I should do things for myself. That’s exactly why I made MiniD, and, I think, exactly why I was able to stick with it for so long. The fact is that drawing lines in the sand is fun. There is no extrinsic reason to do anything, so instead, I’m going to start doing things for their intrinsic value. I’m going to stop caring about how well I do something. I’m going to stop caring whether or not someone else has done it already. I’m just going to jump in and do it, because it sounds fun.

Nihilism can be interpreted pessimistically or optimistically. For the past year, I’ve been nothing but pessimistic. But see, when nothing matters on its own, then you get to choose what matters or not. All that matters to me now is having fun with the time I have here, sharing that time with the people I love, and making them happy. And that’s what I’m going to do.

Three hardware failures in a couple months makes me think it’s something else, most likely the motherboard or maybe even the PSU. But since I have no way of determining which it is (or if it really IS all of those things failing independently), and since replacing them all would cost almost as much as buying a new computer entirely.. well.. I figure I may as well update sooner rather than later.

Well, I started looking at Newegg for parts (as if there’s any other option). I remember when this was a pretty enjoyable task, looking at all the shiny new things, putting together compatible bits and pieces to build a decent machine for a surprisingly low price. But it’s changed.

The first thing that strikes me is just how many choices I have now. I remember when choosing a video card was simple: pick ATi or nVidia, choose one of two or three models, and find a decent manufacturer. But now.. christ on a cracker. Which series of Radeon do I want? The HD 6000, HD 5000, HD 4000, HD 3000, HD 2000, 9, or X1K? How about nVidia? There’s the GeForce GTS400, GTX500, GTX400, GTS200, GTX200, G, GT, 9, 8, 7, 6, and FX. And each of these series has dozens of possibilities: manufacturer, size, SLI capability, memory size, memory speed, built-in cooling, dual-head capability, HDMI, etc. etc. etc.

I. Just. Want. A. Video card. I don’t want the subtask of choosing one to become just as complex as building a computer itself.

So that’s one problem, and only with one kind of part; don’t even get me started on the CPUs. The other problem is that despite a selection of parts that has grown almost comically large in the last few years, it doesn’t seem like anything has cropped up to help consumers decide what parts to get. How do I know this video card, or drive, or memory, or CPU will play nicely with the motherboard chipset or with each other? How do I know how big of a power supply to get? Is the BIOS on this mobo good? Does part X support feature Y, and how well? Which is better, the “nVidia GeForce GTXSXTX 48253028 x2 XXX” or the “nVidia GeForce GTXSXTXXXXX 48253880 x6 XXYXX”?  (By the way, manufacturers, I believe you’re more than milked the letter X for it’s “cool” factor. It’s getting to the point where you’re just obfuscating things now. I’m looking at you in particular, XFX.)

The only site I know of that comes close is Tom’s Hardware, and don’t get me wrong, they do a great service by trying to make this stuff at least somewhat manageable. But looking at TH more recently, I can’t help but get the impression that even they are now overwhelmed by the number of parts there are. A search for “core i5″ brings up over 14,000 results. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Granted, most of those are forum posts, but even restricting the search to reviews leaves me with 661 articles. That’s still far too much information to grok. TH also seems to have a gamer-oriented view on a lot of things, which is fine considering most of the people who care about this stuff are gamers, but what about those of us with a more practical goal in mind?

So, tl;dr: there are FAR too many choices in hardware, and virtually no useful resources seem to exist to help with this monumental task. I’m actually beginning to welcome the idea of pre-built computers, a view that I have found untenable for years. But don’t get me wrong; I’m still going to build this sumbitch.