BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

Sometimes I feel like my brain is a branch predictor. I only know what is gonna happen next by keeping count of how many times it happened before.

Sometimes my nerdiness amazes me…..but the analogy holds pretty true.

If my brain is like a branch predictor, what is my ALU, and how did calculus manage to mess up my integer speed path? I don’t think my FPU ever worked right. Man, between a decent rolling stack (short term memory) and the branch predictor, I barely have a working conscience. Also, someone needs to turn my long term memory into a RAID 5 array, because I need to be able to hot swap broken brain cells and not loose any memory…and could someone improve my file system….I’m always loosing things in there. If someone increased the size of my cache would I do better on tests, or would people just give me a higher PR rating.

Some days it sucks to be me, because you realize that if you could plug my head into a monitor and get email on it, I wouldn’t retail over 20 bucks.

I wonder where you would plug the ethernet cable though?

So lately I’ve been pretty on edge for a whole host of different reasons. I’m a little run down by the fact that Lauren is sick, cuz that is hard to deal with, and there is not much I can do to help her feel better. I’m glad my Mom came to help out for a couple days to take care of her, that should help some. Also, people have been just running my patience thin lately. Too many un-funny jokes, too many shots at me about stuff that I actually take personally (which means you have to hit something just right, because at my house we make fun of each other with reckless abandon most the time, but there are just some places you don’t go). Have you ever thought that someone is acting a certain way, or making lame jokes just to impress someone? I mean, we all act a little differently if we get around certain people, but lately that has really been bugging me. I know some people are super malleable (sp?) to the people they are around, if they get around one person who acts a certain way, they pick up all their traits, annoying or good. After a while it gets pretty old, because you realize it is just an act to get attention/acceptance. It’s really annoying at church too, like that is when you end up with the hyper hypocrites, but now I’m ranting about something that I don’t really have a right to judge. Anyway, lately I’ve been too tired to throw up much of a front for anyone, so if you’re around me, you’re getting “Ben: Raw and Uncensored.” Realizing that I’ve been tired of trying to be nice to people lately led me to the idea that I should make a search that says “GodSearch’s Bad Example” on it….that would be funny.

Anyway, to add to my annoyance, the Garbage guys left a note on Laurens car (which I’ve had for a week since she has been sick) that said “If you park this car here on your trash day again, you can find someone else to haul you.” Now, first off, this is pretty rude in general, and second these guys have been cursing up a storm lately, and making lots of noise, waking up Squirrel boy, and Rob, and I’ve been woke up on other occasions by them. This is just not cool at all. I mean, we get a good deal from these guys on pickup, but what the hell, why do I have to move my car, I park it where Bob used to park his car with no complaints, and secondly do they not value my business. Also, why do they need to get in my driveway anyway? I personally don’t think I want to keep these guys as my garbage pickup people if they can’t drop us a letter, or a phone call, asking us politely to move our cars, and to justify why we should move it. It is my driveway, and they advertised that we wouldn’t have to put our cans on the curb for trash day, so why should I move my car. But anyway, that really upset me….lazy people who hate having to walk 5 yards more with a can then they have to piss me off.

Rob and I decided that we are going to see the movie Club Dread tonight at about 10 pm. I think some people wanted to go with us, so if you do, drop a comment and we’ll make sure to wait for you, or call you with our plans before we leave. And tomorrow night, Seth is going to see Kill Bill: Vol. 1 at Greg hall, so if you are interested drop him a line.

On to class now, maybe later I will start my section of the entries we are going to do on the “modern male dilemma”.

Well, I don’t know if I have mono yet because I didn’t get a chance to head to McKill-me yesterday, and today Lauren called me early in the morning (read before 7 am) to come pick her up from the emergency room. She had Liz take her in on her way to work because her throat had swollen to the point that she couldn’t swallow water…so they gave her vicoden for the pain and sent her home…..Have I mentioned that my Mother’s best friend died as a direct result of negligence on the part of that emergency room. Man, I want to move to city with a good hospital….like Chicago or Peoria so I don’t have to worry about stupid doctors in emergency rooms. So, I went to pick her up and then went back to sleep until almost noon. Now I’m up and moving, but not really going, I haven’t showered yet and I think I’m just gonna stick around the house and do homework for a while. I called my Mom and I think she is gonna come up for a couple days and take care of Lauren so that I can focus back on school and resting enough so I don’t get mono too.

It is funny how mono is this feared disease with all sorts of misconceptions surrounding it. So I will clear this up, it is a virus, nothing more, nothing less. It is not easily contracted through the air, despite what this lady at the grocery store said this morning. It is somewhat hard to get, and studies have shown that roommates of people with mono are no more likely to get mono then the general population. The most likely way to contract the virus is to kiss the person according to some studies done, so that is why it gets the nick-name “the kissing disease.” Also, if you contact the disease as a small child you are very unlikely to develop any symptoms, and you get the added plus of gaining immunity to it at a young age. The only downside is that you can have occurrences of symptoms later in life if you are very exhausted and worn out, but it appears that this mainly happens to people who have contracted it as adults. Also, you can have the virus in your body (or saliva for kissing purposes) anywhere from 18 months after you get it, to the rest of your life. This means that the virus is dormant, or it can’t do any harm to you because ur body has figured out how to keep it under raps, but you can become contagious again under similar conditions to developing the symptoms a second time. To this end, I might have given it to her for all we know. Also, mono is confused a lot with other diseases, you can have similar symptoms for a host of reasons, so it is more likely to assume that you have some variant of the flu or a sinus infecting then reoccurring symptoms from mono.

So a thought would be for everyone we know who has small children to take them to Laurens place and to let hem kiss her, so they can be immune to it later in life and have little, if any side effects. But if you don’t want to do that, I could understand why…;)

Finally, I wrote yesterday about Lent which got more of a reaction then I initially expected. Mainly I was venting about how people try to push meaning onto me concerning traditions, and how in general I hate traditions, but of course that bred people explaining why they push traditions at me, which is OK I guess, but all I’m really getting at is that tradition isn’t for everyone. Anyone who would have talked to me two years ago about communion would know that I didn’t take communion, I hated it, for some of the same reasons I hate the traditions surrounding the Lent season. But one day during church I really felt like God said, “go take communion” and I of course asked “why?” and he told me “because I said so just now, and in the Bible” and that was the end of it. Right then and their he placed meaning me into the act of taking communion. Now, if you gain meaning from something because of the tradition behind it, that is great, you have gained something in a way that I can’t. You can follow the tons of people before you just because they saw something in it and then you see the significance of it from that, for me I have to see something in it for me, not just because others have found it important. You can say to me all sorts of stuff trying to persuade me otherwise, but I’m really stubborn about this, and really stubborn about most things of this similar nature. I’m not against trying things to see if God wants to show me something in those acts, I’ve gained a lot of understanding lately about doing some things just because God asks us to. I’m willing to go to the Bible and look for places where God commands us to do things, or where people do certain things to be closer to God or to gain some understanding of him, and try those out. But the thing is that those people were pretty crazy. Fasting for 40 days wasn’t a tradition then and neither was laying on ur side for almost a year, they did it because God told them to. That is how I feel about Lent, and a host of other traditions. If you want to approach me about it, you have to understand that I come from a family that is huge on tradition, in the family and in the church. Just ask my Mother what color the alter cloth is for any given month and she can tell you what it is, why it is that color, and what that color signifies. I’ve tried most of this stuff, just because my folks said it was a good idea, or because the church is doing it, and I found no significance in it. I believe that I am susposed to go new ways, open new doors for people, create new traditions for some people so they don’t feel weighted down with the past. I also believe that God wants to supply new personal meanings to old traditions at some point, like he did with communion. Which means I don’t think he just wants me to blindly follow the past, but instead give me new personal meaning for some things. I still don’t think that will ever happen with Lent, but it might, and I’m open to that.

So, anyway, I could go the rest of my life without hearing why some ancient tradition is supposed to be important to me ever again. So unless you want to pretend that you know better than God about how He wants to speak to my life I could stand to not hear anymore about it. But I understand that people are just trying to help and to make me think, but believe me, I’ve thought about it, I still don’t like it.

OK, I’m late for Lab, Later.

So sometime today I have to go get tested for mono. I was really beat for a good part of yesterday, and I went to bed around 11ish, maybe fell asleep somewhere between 11 and 11:30, and I looked at my clock after 7 this morning, and thought I’ll just nap for a bit and then get up for class, next thing I know it is well after 9 and I am late for class, so I say screw it. Then I look at the clock again, and it is 10:30, so I say screw it again, and decide I’m down for the count today. This means I slept for 10 to 11 hours last night, and I’m still tired. So that sucks. I’m going to try to get to work today, and maybe to McKill-me for a mono test. I really hope I’m just exhausted and don’t actually have mono, because I don’t know if I can afford to have mono since no one I know can turn my homework in, and I have lab classes that I have to go to. This really has the possibility of being devastating to my grades if I even am out for a week, especially since in the next two weeks I have tests in two classes. Oh well, maybe if I can focus I can study and do homework between naps.

I usually don’t like Lent, I hate giving stuff up for no better reason then it is tradition. I think it is a stupid tradition, and whenever I have given something up for Lent is has made no difference in my life as far as anything spiritual happening, all it does is make me want whatever I gave up that much more. Also, I think people just randomly assign what they are going to give up a lot. I know a lot of people who give up chocolate or cheese or something that they really like for no better reason then they like it a lot. This seems silly to me, shouldn’t you ask God what he wants you to give up, and not just randomly pick something. So because of this, and the fact that I know a lot of people who don’t consider themselves good Christians who still give up stuff for lent, I have often decided to abstain from this silly tradition. So when people ask me what I gave up (like it was any of their business in the first place) I say “I’m giving up giving things up” and they usually chuckle or think I’m stupid, either way I don’t care. Dirk went so far as to harass me about it yesterday and told me that it is stupid to always say stuff like that, and I promptly told him that I could give a rats ass what he thought about me giving stuff up. Mainly peoples responses to my answer annoy me no matter what. Even if I were to give something up, it’s none of your business what it is, so why do people feel the need to cram this down my throat like they are some kind of super Christan cuz they are fasting one day a week for 6 weeks. Big deal, hooray for you, now leave me the hell alone so I can do my own thing, and keep it to myself. I really hate to be told what I “should” be doing by other Christians, I think that just makes people sound pompous and hypocritical, and I really think that if you find yourself constantly telling people what they “should” be doing then you need to re-examine what you are doing because you are in close danger of heading toward hypocrite-ville….especially about something silly like giving stuff up for lent.

Now, with my concerns about Lent voiced, I will say that doing a fasting campaign for 40 days to help with raising money for a new building makes a whole lot more sense. I have a purpose behind giving stuff up, I’m seeking to know Gods heart more so I can be a part of accomplishing something well beyond the normal means of the church. That makes sense, and like I said about Lent, I’m seeking what I need to fast while this campaign is going on, and I think I got an idea, but I don’t really feel like sharing because I’m tired of the “what are you giving up” question, so don’t ask me, and I’ll try not to ask you. Also, I think there is power in corporate submission to God’s will by fasting. I think that taking time to focus on God instead of doing the stuff that you gave up is a good thing. I really do believe that this will help with raising this money, and it will help people to let God decide what they can give for our new Building of Hope instead of them deciding what they can afford to give.

The last thing I’m going to write is another one of those tests, you can click the link and it will take you to the test, and my brief thoughts on it if you want, but this is already too long, so I’m going to crop it here.
Continue reading ‘Mono, Lent, and another test’

So, I was listening to the planet the other day and I heard a song called “Absolutely Wasted” by a band called Abandon. And I was thinking that this is a pretty funny song. Then I got to thinking about all the funny songs I’ve heard about being drunk or high, and I got to thinking that it would be cool to make a CD and call it “the bad example CD” and I was looking for some ideas. Then I thought tossing some funny songs about sex in there might work too. So I have some sublime on there, like “smoke two joints” and “40 oz’s to freedom” and “caress me down”, and i have the abandon song, and afroman - because I got high, and Denis Leary’s Asshole song (it doesn’t fit the drunk/high/sex theme, but it is a good song about being a bad example), then some NOFX and George Thorogood, and Tom T. Hall - I like beer, and finally Zebrahead - Playmate of the Year.

So, I’m looking for some amusing songs about drinking, being drunk, smoking things, or being stoned or whatever, and maybe some other random songs about being a bad example in one way or another. Please suggest some stuff, so I can make this as amusing as possible.

Cingular bought AT&T wireless today, and I think this might be a good thing. First off, AT&T was already in the process of upgrading it’s networks to the new 3G stuff (I think it is called EDGE) which is for higher data rates making wireless video streamed to your phone possible, and better wireless internet to the phone and such things. Also, that means that cingular could have better area coverage for their new GSM network. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about in the US there are three main standards that cellular phones use. The old one which supports analog and digital transmission, and is what cingular still has for old phones like mine is TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and they have amazing coverage with this network. I actually got a signal at the Grand Canyon with my phone a couple years back. Now, Europe uses GSM, which is what the new network Cingular is building is, and AT&T had a GSM network. The final type is CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) which is what Verizon and some other people use, and it is being pushed pretty much just in the US, also some people are lobbying congress to get it installed in Iraq, which is dumb cuz that means their phones won’t work anywhere else in the Middle east, but I digress. But I currently have Cingular and I have been a fan of their pricing system and coverage area for a while, but when they switched over to GSM their coverage gets much more sparse. Currently they run both networks, which is good, but I was waiting to get a GSM phone until they had better coverage.

So, Cingular buying AT&T is a good thing I think, hopefully it will add services that Cingular offers, and be better for the consumer in many ways. I’m not too worried about the loss of competition, because quite frankly, I found AT&T’s prices to be entirely to high to consider them much of a competitor to Cingular and Verizon in the long run. Also, this will hopefully allow me to get an even cooler phone that does neat video stuff.

Well I found that interesting this morning, so I thought I would share.