Month: March 2002

As you can probably tell, my last couple of posts have been fairly negative in theme and direction. As I said last night, this is probably due to the extreme amounts of frustration that not being able to update or tweak my site has caused me. Unfortunately there is sweet-fuck-all that I can do about it at the moment so griping and venting is about my only outlet. So bear with me as it will probably continue for the near future or until things change at my ISP.

In other news though, I’ve been pondering a comment that my darling wife made to me in passing while we were on our honeymoon and it has sort of stuck with me to the point that I’m going to blather on to you all about it *grin*

The comment she made was that if there was anyone she knew that would be a Buddhist, it would be me. Now I snickered a little and made some pithy comment at the time like any good Irish protestant lad would (not that I’m technically a “good” protestant or anything) but after a time I got to thinking about it some more.

Now on one hand, it would seem that my wife was implying that nothing much phases me and I live my life in some Zen-like cocoon and some times, that is exactly how I live my life. It tends to be more of a trance than a cocoon though as there are days when I don’t notice much of anything. On the other hand though, what she said could also mean that my outlook on life seemed to coincide with many of the Buddhist and zen philosophies.

After thinking on it in the time since we returned from our honeymoon, I’ve come to the conclusion that she is probably right on both points. My world views and outlook do tend to follow some natural zen path through everything I do. I tend to take the non-confrontational path more often than not, and I also try to see through all the dross and mumbo-jumbo that surrounds ideas and dogmas to see the crucial central lesson at the core.

Now that isn’t to say that I’m going to go shave my head and put on a saffron robe, but it does say something about me. That here is a man who has grown up with a natural cynicism and disdain for religion and yet, has managed to find an equilibrium within himself that parallels certain teachings.

I’ve always considered the cult of Christianity to be the biggest bunch of hypocritical idiots that the Earth has seen since we climbed out of the trees. Dogma bothers me. Blind faith bothers me. Being unable or unwilling to open your head to the possibility of more than one idea bothers the living fuck out of me (especially when I catch myself doing it).

Paganism has always appealed to me in the sense that, it at least is open to the idea that there is and can be more than one driving force in the universe. And by paganism, I do not specifically mean Wicca or any of these other new age mother Gaea worshipping cults. I’m talking about the pantheistic pagans; those that worship Thor and Loki and Odin or Ra and Anubis and Horus or Lugh and Morrigan and Danu. The ones that have the sense to embrace the idea that all concepts and ideas can have or be a god.

Now I’m not saying that the pagans are right, but at least they have the sense not to blindly follow the 2000 year old cult of YHVH (That’s Yahweh for the uninitiated. The original Hebrew name of God) just because everyone else says that they should. Who knows, perhaps every “god” is all just one tiny facet of a greater consciousness that we’ve yet to even begin to comprehend. Let’s wait and see shall we?

And in other news…

I’m grumpy as all get out because I still can’t update my frigging website remotely. My damned ISP FINALLY responded to me after I sent them two, no sorry it was three nasty emails.

Their response? Guess. Go on, I dare you!

No, “Please hold.” wasn’t quite right, but close enough to win you the weekly prize of not getting your head kicked by me. Their very polite and very vague response was simply that “they were endeavouring to enable remote access and should have it working in their next publish in the near future” but there was no indication whatsoever when that publish or that near future would be.

So in the meantime, I continue to sit with my thumb up my bum and my websites (yes there is a plural there) continue to drift further into the background waste of out of date internet space.

I think perhaps that this too has fueled my ire about the lack of commenting that I so eloquently ranted on about in the previous posts. The fact that all I can do to this website is comment via this blogger is annoying, and it gets boring after a time to be honest. It’s like having a panel full of bright flashing buttons and all I get to do is play with the one black one that turns one red light on and off occasionally. I want to frigging change the damn poll, I want to frigging change my bloody bio so as it says I have a wife rather than a fiancee, I just want to do something other than post here dammit.

Okay…. rant over as this isn’t going anywhere purposeful. I’m going to bed now. G’night

BAH! It figures. The day after I post my rant on the lack of comments, the damn site that I use for the comments went down for whatever reason. Luck of the friggin Irish I tell ya.

So it came to me the other night that I’ve become fairly vain with my blogger posts and am starting to get frustrated with certain aspects that, and lets be honest here, are completely the fault of you, the reader.

I feel that I have posted fairly consistently over the past little while on a broad spectrum of topics from the mindless to the mundane, yet I have no clue if anyone is listening. My topics seem to be the type that nobody wants to talk about or comment on. Every other blog that I go to seems to have comments galore from regular readers (even if those readers are just the blog-master’s immediate friends and family) and I’m dreadfully jealous. Some part of me wants to be part of the in-crowd. To know that I’m liked, admired or that someone is just paying attention to me. All I really want is validation that my time and effort are worth it I guess.

So yes, I admit it. I’m grumpy because no one ever comments on my topics or that I only get one or two comments now and then. I’ve tried the do unto others as you would have them do unto you bit, but that only gets me so far and not everyone likes to comment, but for every 3 that don’t comment there hopefully will be one that will.

Yes I know that this is silly and vain and this is just my desperate cry for self gratification and attention as I plead with you all to appease my fragile ego and comment at least once but I can’t help myself and figure that if I rant long enough, I’ll get at least one grudging comment out of pity or to shut me up.

So with that mini-rant over and done I shall now retire for the evening. Pax

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day

to all you poor souls that had the poorest luck not to be born Irish and can’t celebrate daily.

My condolences to you all. I shall endeavour to drink your allotted share of whiskey with good cheer.

Wish me luck.

Today’s random musing has been brought to light by the stupidity of the US government, or more specifically their INS division.

The other day I was reading an Article that was sent to me regarding the pilots of the September 11^th terrorist attacks on the U.S. In the article we find that some idiot approved these terrorists for Student Visa’s so as they could take the technical classes needed to fly the planes. Not only that, but one of the recipients of a Visa had an outstanding warrant out for his arrest in Florida.

Now to me this is very pathetic and is a testament to the stupidity and idiocy of the bureaucracy spawned and propogated by both big business and big governments around the world (though in some cases you are starting to be unable to tell the difference between corporations and government). Not only does the right hand rarely know what the left hand is doing, half the time it isn’t even aware of what it is doing. It is stupid things like this that make you wonder why people are so shocked when events like September 11^th happen. The government isn’t all knowing or all powerful. Hell half the time it’s just going through the motions because that is ALL it has ever been trained to do.

Let this be a lesson to us all. Before everything else: THINK! QUESTION! LEARN!!! Don’t just do something because it’s easy or because it is the status quo of the time.

For those of you looking for more examples of stupid bureaucratic idiocy, I shall direct you to page seven of the INS form that one has to fill out to become a Permanent Resident in the U.S. It has some wonderfully stupid questions that make you wonder why anyone would EVER answer yes to them. Such as: Have you ever committed Genocide?, Are you a Communist?, Are you planning on committing Espionage while in the U.S.?, Have you ever declared Diplomatic Immunity to avoid prosecution while in the U.S.?, And my personal favourite… Do you plan on practicing polygamy while in the U.S.?

The scary thing is that, based on the idiocy evident in the first part of my rant, somewhere in America there is someone who answered Yes to all those questions and is now a Permanent Resident…

Today’s Mindless quiz to help you get through the day was…

The Which Matrix Character are you? But as is the norm with these quizzes, the creator seriously underestimated the demand on their bandwidth and the quiz has since been taken down.

The link is below, maybe one day it will reappear.



Which Matrix Character Are You?

And if anyone cared… I was Morpheus.

Okay… Another pointless quiz cause I’m bored.

Which Muppet Are You?

It’s a muppet quiz enjoy.

In other, non-wedded bliss related, news…

I still don’t have any remote FTP access so updating my site in any shape, form or fashion is on hold for the moment. I’ll update when I again have access. Hopefully that won’t be too long.

And to top things off, it looks like Bravenet, the service that I get my free polls and guestbook and such from, was hacked while I was away and they’ve blocked outside access to their site while they investigate the breach. Unfortunately this makes many of my pages not load properly as your browser searches for images and information that currently isn’t there. And as I have no access to my ftp, I can’t comment out the offending HTML. So you’ll all just have to suck it up and wait, just like me.

Well, I’m back from my honeymoon. I apparently survived the wedding and the subsequent trip to Maui. I had a great time and things went off without too many problems… unfortunately like all good things in the world, I remember only little snapshots here and there. I keep finding that I’m unable to remember the events of the whole day all at once. It’s like my mind will only let me view snippets of the event to protect me from the vast scope of everything that was happenning around me. I focus on one thing and everything else blurs out. It is a strange way to feel but for some reason I don’t mind. It feels right. Like each little snippet or snapshot is brought into clearer focus because of the lack of distracting background noise.

Oh well, I guess that is the nature of the beast. Maybe one day humanity will have the capability to comprehend events in a larger scope but for now we’ll all just have to deal with living in a snapshot reality.

Later…