Recently I was gifted a new car (1997 Nissan Pathfinder) by my step-mom's family to replace my ever-faithful 1996 Jeep Cherokee Sport. The Jeep was my first car and a perfect first car at that; it was nice enough to stay running (most of the time) and shitty enough not to have to constantly worry about every little bump and scrape (and quicksand trap...).

It also had 4-wheel-drive (courtesy of the rock-solid NP231 transfer case) and a beefy straight-6 motor... which lent itself not only to really bad gas mileage and frequent fill-ups, but also to a respectable amount of torque and offroading abilities. I also could burn anybody off the starting line... until about the 35-40 MPH mark. And when shifting into the all-balls, crawl-licious 2.72:1 low range, the entire Jeep would lurch from the drive shafts slamming into gear and rob the planet of just a little bit of angular momentum... reminding me of what a powerful force I wielded. And who could forget nerdgasmic addition of a manual shifting circuit I built by hacking the shift-control computer.

Needless to say... I had a badass time with that piece. From offroading in remote forests in Rockwall and Rowlett, to throwing mud around and doing pointless donuts in random fields... to just driving all over the damn place in it... I loved it.

Unfortunetly, I think the end of it's glory days is in site. There's really no reason to have two cars in college, especially when the Pathfinder is in MUCH better condition than the Jeep: The Jeep's brakes are all but dead, there's a loud leak from a crack in the exhaust manifold, the rear differential leaks sometimes, the AC compressor seizes when the car isn't moving, the tint is molting off the windows, and there are tons of bumps, scratches, and broken shit on both the inside and out. There's even a gaping wound with wires and connectors grotesquely visible where a stereo ought to be. 

I never realized what a piece of junk it was until I drove it for the first time in about a month the other day. The first thing I noticed was that it felt so much more powerful than the Pathfinder... a small price to pay for better gas mileage I suppose. It also felt like it was about to fall apart... it was so loud, creaking, rattling, and old feeling. I loved it though... and felt a sense of betrayal when I reached for the shifter and missed... having become accustomed to where everything was in the Pathfinder.

It felt like the last time I would ever drive it...

I took the long route around town to where I was going, and peeled out whenever I had a chance. Using the manual shifter, I would floor it at green lights and let the familiar sensation of acceleration and a couple hundred horses wash over me. Do I really have to sell it?

I've always had a strong attachment to this jeep... maybe just because it was my first car and all. There's just a lot of good memories with that beast, and it will hard to let go. Of course, the cool $K-spot or so will be nice though.

I feel like I'll act like the concerned dog breeder selling puppies: ensuring that the new owner will love and cherish it just as I did. I don't want this to be some old granny's shuttle to happy-hour bingo and senior-citizen movie nights; I want it to go to somebody that will let the true spirit of the Jeep out where it belongs... in the dirt, in the mud... and in the wild.

So I guess this is goodbye for you and me, Jeep... we had a good run together. I hope that where you're going, you can spend your last years doing what you love to do best; I only hope your new owner can give you things you could only dream of when you were with me. Maybe that lift kit we would always talk about... the after-market exhaust... a new windshield even?

Don't think the Pathfinder is replacing you-- no car could do that... especially a Nissan. There will always be a bright-blue Cherokee-sized hole in my heart that no other vehicle could fill. It's been great.

So drive on Jeep... and don't look back.

So, it's been a while since the last update... but I'm refusing to let this blog die the slow and quiet death my blogs of the past have seen. Today, however, I think I realized exactly what has caused all of my previous sites in general to vanish into the dark nothingness of the Internet... and why I haven't updated in a while.

Basically, the life of a college kid is in constant flux; every 4 months, you have a brand new set of classes, a completely new schedule, and new professors. Or it may even be summer and you're either back at home, working at an internship, doing summer school... or maybe just lounging around for 3 months being a bitch.

Point is... each discontinuity on the life v. time graph has very little sympathy for old developed habits and the like... so things that I had gotten into a good groove for (blogging in this case) tend to fall by the wayside. Since my day-to-day schedule is so different than it was during the school year, my internal cron service needs a revamping. But, now that I've settled in at work, it's time to reinstate all the mundane and miscellaneous minutia I love to saturate my life with.

It makes me wonder how long I will have this site, and this blog. This current incarnation of the site specifically is relatively new (PHP/MySQL), but I have blog entries I imported from an old live journal (circa 2005), as well as the previous brandonvalosek.com site.

Will I be writing about my kid's first words some day? Or maybe how the Drrty Boiz are still rocking out at age 80... giving arthritis the finger and playing at our local retirement home... who knows? But for now, expect updates to return to their regularly scheduled frequency.

Today marked the beginning of my return to the closest thing I have to a real adult life: a corporate job (internship) at Dell. Among the constant tom-foolery and jack-assery of college life, there's really not much during they day that resembles what life will really be like after I graduate and become a big 'ol grown-up... besides paying bills I guess.

But this summer and last, I had a chance to see what life might be like working a typical 40-hour-a-week corporate job for a big company. It's all there: the daily commute in shit traffic, the infamous cube farms, the meetings, and all the bureaucracy and processes you would expect to see in a Fortune 20 company with over 90,000 employees worldwide.

Corporate culture is funny to me, though. Everyone seems to have this personality they put on when interacting at the office-- almost like this faux casual way of talking, but in such a way as to not offend anyone or say something too non-PC.

There's also the semi-awkward closeness you can develop with people you work with on a daily basis. You interact with these people every day... maybe even go out to eat lunch with them and joke around some... but in reality... you aren't even remotely close to them. Though you might spend more time with them during the week than some friends, you don't have even the slightest idea as to what type of music they like, what their hobbies are... their dreams, hopes, fears.

From this sort of distance that you can put yourself from your co-workers coupled with the need to work well together to be an effective team, a very weird relationship is formed. Your team is basically a bastardized family unit; everyone has his own role, status, and importance while their "real" lives back home are immaterial.

At the office, everyone is expected to do their job without outside factors effect them. Regardless of background, emotional situations, family, race, gender... anything... the second you swipe your badge and step into the building you become An Employee, with all the accrued emotional and personal baggage you carry veiled behind the business-casual attire and 5' 10" cubical walls.

This isn't to say you can't have real relationship with people at work, or that you can't ever get to know people and develop good friends at the office... it's more of just a reflection of the general type of interactions I've noticed. If you never got to know anybody on a personal level... I'm sure work would seem like an emotionless hell-hole.

And who would want to work at a place like that?

So a friend of mine sent me a link to a video of a guy that calls himself The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) rapping about good site design practices and SEO optimization. This guy is pretty ridiculous... and he has some more videos on his YouTube profile as well if you want to check them out. Here's the video:

Pretty damned funny, I think. In other news, I start working for Dell tomorrow. I'm looking forward to having (at least temporarily, before Fall tuition is due) a positive  derivative to my $/time graph.

I'll be working in the enterprise product group on a new family of servers with the board team, as well as doing some work for the firmware guys. My manager also mentioned that they need somebody to port an aging MS Access database to a MySQL/PHP solution, and since I've learned quite a bit about that stuff from doing this site, it would make a great side project.

I'm also very much looking forward to getting into a routine again... the next few weeks are crucial for getting my fat ass into a workout and running schedule. I'm hoping I can run 4-5 times a week and work out least twice, but hopefully three times.

One last thing-- today I basically just wasted away my life with Derek in what was a quintessential summer day:  woke up lazily at about 1 PM, then proceeded to make sandwiches, then read some out in the sun followed by a swim spot, and then Randall's for some grosh. We made some questionably-shitty frozen pizzas dinner, and then in a bit we're going to be making some Rice Krispies treats.

Does it get any better than that?

Infinity is a pretty weird concept, to be honest. You can't really have an infinite amount of anything (at least anything that's real). Pi has an infinite number of shit digits after it, but math is an entirely man-made abstract concept... so that doesn't count.

But maybe the entire universe itself is infinite? It might seem so... with our lonely little asses whirling around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy... which in turn is just one of 125 billion or so galaxies we think are in the universe. And when the number of stars is something with more than 20 zeros after it, it seems like it might as well be an infinite universe out there.

But even unimaginably huge is nowhere near infinity. An infinite universe is one that either extends forever in time or in space-- or both. But what-ever-the-hell exactly does that mean?

An Infinite Amount of Space

A universe with an infinite amount of space in it seems like it wouldn't really be that big of a deal. But exactly what would take up all that space? Lots and lots and lots of shit to be sure. Anything and everything imaginable would be taking up that space. Just like in the infinite series of digits in pi you can find any arbitrary long sequence of numbers any arbitrary amount of time, you could come up with any imaginable physical entity (a person, a planet, a galaxy) and eventually, somewhere in the universe, it would exist.

In fact, if the universe were truly infinite in space, then somewhere there is somebody almost exactly like me on a planet almost exactly like Earth probably writing some shit blog entry like I am now. Within an infinite space, eventually at some point, all possible physical configurations would exist.

Another similar view is one of the many theories behind the nature of quantum mechanics: the many-worlds interpretation.

Typical Quantum Bullshit

If you know even a little about quantum theory, you know a) it is some counter-intuitively mind-boggling crap, and b) an outcome to any quantum experiment is not deterministic; rather there is some distribution of probability for various outcomes occurring. Although good 'ol Einstein disagreed when he said "God does not play dice", the countless experiments seem to refute this idea.

The many-worlds interpretation basically states that instead of the quantum wave function of a system (that random probability of outcomes) collapsing into a single state when we measure it, there are actually universes where every possible outcome exist. In other words... for every possible quantum state of every system, there exists a separate universe with that outcome.

For the classic Schrödinger's cat example, the cat does not exist in the superposition of being both alive and dead, but there are at least two universes: one in which the cat is alive, and one in which the cat is dead.

In this sense, there could be an infinite number of universes... all with different outcomes to various quantum events. Imagine-- every decision you've ever made in your life... there would be an entirely separate universe in which you chose something differently.

All in theory of course.

Whatever

So is the universe infinite? No clue. But if it is, then there are certainly some very weird consequences about the nature of our reality. Who knows, maybe there are an infinite number of you in alternate universes... living out every possible life you could live.

Or maybe it's all just bullshit.