Fixing the problem almost always leads to thinking “Damn, I wish I had done that earlier”. Why do people do that? Maybe everyone has a tolerance for putting up with life’s miscellaneous  annoyances and thus never really find it necessary to fix. Maybe it’s just the false perception that the time and effort required to alleviate the problem isn’t worth the 1 second inconvenience caused by the problem.

Venturing away from the abstract leads me to think of one of the most illustrative examples I can think of. My ex-roommate had a small fridge in his room for his own personal stock of beverages, eggs, and other random shit. This fridge sat on a rug which in turn naturally sat on the floor. Well actually the fridge sat right in front of the rug. The preposition matters because the door was blocked from opening by the edge of the rug… so you had to step on the rug a certain way in order to let the fridge door pass over the top of it.

I watched him struggle with that for two years, for no reason. The solution? Taking 30 seconds to put some old magazines under the fridge to prop it up enough to give it clearance over the rug. Problem solved.

Take the time to evaluate the integral of annoyance over time. Compare to the effort required to solve said annoyance. Reflect, act,  and continue with your life… only better.

I created the site www.cncboards.net to allow CnC players to track their stats and match history, as well as view detailed ranked ladder info. This sort of code could be useful to other Command & Conquer fan sites, so I’ve decided to release some of it.

It’s really basic… as I didn’t include all of the database functionality that I also designed. Currently the library just includes a class that allows you to load player stats for any Red Alert 3, Command & Conquer 3, or Kane’s Wrath player.

Check out the cncstats PHP library.

Can’t really blame people, though. Acoustics play a large part in it, especially in large venues. But even still people should understand the speed of sound matters once you get far enough away from something, so scratch that… you can blame people.

What absolutely kills it is when the piece features tempo changes or ritardandos at the end… you hear the audience struggle and ultimately give up as their feeble understanding of musical time and temp falls apart around them like a lean-to in a category-5 tornado. I can’t imagine what would happen if they tried to clap along with an odd meter song like The Ocean by Led Zeppelin or Take Five by Dave Brubeck…

Besides, clapping along to music is just about the corniest method of music expression out there. Shake your ass, dance, fist pump even… just don’t add your own cacophony to the performance en masse with the rest of the musically challenged audience.

Pick up the shampoo or toothpaste, procede to read the back.

Prove me wrong.

I then eventually made a PHP and MySQL site, but again from scratch. I taught myself PHP and learned a lot about databases, but the site was basic, inflexible, and arduous to work on and update. The cooking metaphor? Making a cake from complete scratch, and doing a half-assed icing job. The most rewarding part was knowing you baked it yourself with your own recipe. It looks bad, but tastes pretty good. In the end your kitchen is a mess though, and you spent a lot of time working on it.

Finally, I gave up and installed Wordpress, an extremely popular CMS. I transferred over the majority of my blogs, but have yet to update it since. Extended metaphor aficionados could see this as making a boxed cake, and hiring a professional to do the icing job.

So I haven’t posted a blog in over a year, and I’m hoping to get back into it. Since I’ve installed Wordpress and seen how extremely flexible and easy to use it is, I have helped a few different friends set up their own websites, all powered by Wordpress. I don’t regret rolling my own site for so long, but the time has come to abandon the persuit for web development knowledge and jump on the all-in-one CMS bandwagon.

Hopefully soon, my blog will again but graced by the elegant unintelligible babble of my own obfuscated reflections on life. Something I’m sure that you, dear reader, are shitting yourself over in anticipation.

So I setup a new partition on my system drive… and away I went.

The Fonts Look Like Ass

The very first thing I noticed when my computer booted to the Linux Gnome desktop is that the fonts look like booboo. At first I wasn’t very concerned, because it wasn’t until Vista that TrueType (a subpixel font rendering engine from Microsoft) was enabled by default. But even after messing with the settings and trying Linux’s version of subpixel font rendering, the results were still less that pleasing. Horrible gamma correction, shitty hinting options… etc.

The most common advice when trying to find a solution was to download Microsoft’s fonts (especially the new Vista fonts). Kind of ironic, huh? Even then, the fonts still looked like vomit to me. And what was worse, the overall font sizes had to be larger to remain clear, when on Windows I could lower the size and still maintain legibility. Everything in Gnome had to be bigger… effectively reducing my screen real estate.

Free Software Blows

There are exceptions, of course. Firefox, for example… is a great browser. But there are NO true alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite, the Adobe Creative Suite, or Microsoft Visual Studio.

The Gimp (the shitty GNU image editor/Photoshop replacement) is under featured, buggy, and slower than Photoshop. I tried to give this app a chance, but it’s pretty horrible. OpenOffice looks and feels like Office 95 or worse, and is less stable than Office 2007 SP1. It’s also slower to open, with a lot of rendering bugs from my existing documents.

And there is NOTHING comparable to the ease of use of Outlook 2007. I use it to seamlessly check my email from my UT account and my Gmail, as well as synchronize my calendar and contacts via Bluetooth with my phone, and keep up-to-date on my friends via their shared Outlook calendars. Nothing on Linux can do that… without a horribly complex and counter-intuitive process that half-assedly works half the time (25% efficiency?).

None of the billions of music apps that are out there even remotely compare to the stability, speed, and aesthetic appeal of Winamp or iTunes either… so hopefully you don’t like listening to music much.

Of course, there was nothing even remotely as powerful as the SONAR 8 + FL Studio 8 combo I have running under Vista. With Vista, my latencey for my outboard sound hardware was about 5.9ms, with Linux (and lmms), it was around 320ms.

And I don’t care what everyone else says, VIm is not a replacement for Visual Studio.

You can’t really blame them… of course a nerd-run project that is in perpetual beta is not going to hold a candle to the products of multi-billion dollar companies like Microsft, Apple, and Adobe… but the Linux fans need to stop acting like this isn’t the case.

Anyway…

Technically, Linux is a great operating system. This website is actually run on a Linux server and is extremely reliable… but I think that’s as far as it goes. Sure it’s fun to geek around with compiling all your own shit and what not, but most people (even most geeks) will just want an OS that works out of the box.

Linux is NOT a consumer-level desktop OS for a power user, home audio enthusiast, productivity geek, digital artists, film producer, songwriter/music producer, or most average people.

Maybe for old granny, who doesn’t need to do anything but check her email and look up cross-stitching patterns on the internet, Linux is good because you don’t have to buy the Microsoft products. But… what if she needs to print something? Good luck getting the drivers to work.

Or maybe old granny knows how to download custom drivers and compile them herself?

Anyway, so I’m reading up on the MAX5154 12-bit DAC chip that I’m planning on using for one of my labs and I decided to bust out my 80 GB Zune. The Zune, by the way, is a seriously underrated MP3 player; I like the interface better than the latest iPod. Also, the display uses a highly reflective screen background with white text, so even in the horrible glare fest that is a Texas afternoon, the display is perfectly legible.

Back to tutoring– the tutors sit at a huge 30-person conference table and wait for students to walk in and sign up. Even with only 20 people or so, the room quickly gets VERY loud.

So I queue up T.I.’s latest album (Paper Trails) and unroll my headphones. As I bring the buds up to my ears, the buzz of activity… tutors talking to students, some guy drawing on the whiteboard, and a few frustrated freshmen all instantly disappear… replaced by the phat production of ‘Paper Trails’ slamming into my eardrums at 761 MPH. I ceased to be part of the room.

I no longer have any ability to effectively interact with anyone else… all I can do is look around the room and imagine what is going on. Like watching a TV show… everything is so one-way and inaccessible.

After a few hours of listening to music… it’s time to leave. Popping the buds out of my ear, I return to being part of the world. Turns out the token stoner EE guy has been bitching about not getting a sandwich he ordered an hour ago from Jimmy Johns… and of course those frustrated freshman are 10% closer to switching their major to liberal arts.

And so for two and a half hours, I wasn’t part of their world. Nobody talked to me… I couldn’t hear them anyway. Their stories and interactions served as nothing more than a slightly-out-of-focus backdrop to my life while I starred at this screen.

I wonder if I really missed anything?

We assume that every human we see around us– our friends, family, kids, adults– experience the same sort of self awareness and sense of existence as we do. In other words, for all 6 billion people on the planet, there’s a soul in the driver’s seat for each and every one of them.

And most of us also assume belief in some supreme being or beings, so even when all else fails… you at least know there’s something out there bigger than you imposing some sort of reason on your existence.

But what if, in actuality, your awareness is the one and only in the entire universe? Meaning everyone else you see isn’t a complex and rich personality, but rather is an empty shell that just coincidentally happens to exhibit behaviors that would seem to suggest a soul.

This is not unlike saying the entire universe as you perceive it is nothing more than a lengthy dream, only more life-like than anything else you’ve experienced simply because you haven’t “woken up” yet. This isn’t entirely unimaginable because everyone has had a dream of waking up thinking a dream was over, only to wake up again– realizing you were having a dream within a dream.

Another way to state this idea is to say that your interaction with external events is isolated– everyone else exists not in the same sense that you do, but rather just in the sense that your perception of the universe imposes their existence.

Could this really be the way things are? Is the universe completely populated by soulless caricatures of intelligence, and you’re the only one single awareness that exists and will ever exist?

I really hope not, or it would be one lonely universe.

Even as much as hearing the shitty FM synth music on YouTube brings back memories… I also have played and beaten almost every Sonic game on the Genesis. When the time of the old 16-bit system came and went, I even downloaded an emulator on my PC and replayed most of the games (or at least my favorite parts). More recently, I played them on my phone with a Smartphone-based Genesis emulator. Interesting how it took dedicated hardware back in elementary school to do now what can be done in software real-time on my phone…

Anyway… I regressed into my childish pastimes of playing console video games and recently purchased a Nintendo DS. First of all… I was amazed at how advanced 7th generation handheld systems are; the DS can pump out 3D graphics comparable to the Nintendo 64 and comes with onboard Wi-Fi… both for ad-hoc gaming with a friend close by or over the Internet to play with people all over the world. Badass.

One of the games I bought was Sonic Adventure Rush… one of the most recent additions to the Sonic franchise. I had high hopes and high expectations; the format was similar to the Genesis games… run as fast-as-hell to the right of the screen, pickup rings, and don’t die.

I was happy to see that the new additions Sonic had seen since my first exposure to the series 10 years ago didn’t take away from the game and render it an unfamiliar generic platform game– it was the exact opposite actually. The new game on DS is faster and crazier than its little brother on Genesis… but it retains the same spirit.

There’s enough in common with the old game to make me feel like I’m back in the prepubescent and innocent years of elementary school… and that’s probably why I love playing it. It provides a small amount of escapism from the quickly-approaching “real life” that is less than a year away. I’m just glad that at 21 years old, jumping off of springs and collecting golden rings still has the ability to entertain me for a while.

Now if you will excuse me… I’m going to go play some Sonic on my DS.

For example, imagine a perspective where a lifetime is measured not in tens of years, but in billions of years, and traversing across galaxies is as easy as going from city to city for us. You could see the life cycles of stars, the formation of new planets, life, evolution… and truly appreciate the vastness of the universe. We, on the other hand, exist for such a vanishingly small amount of time on such a small little chunk of the universe.

It’s also limiting that we are experiencing time in a one-dimensional, collapsed manner. The past is continually fleeing from us and the future is nebulous… but that could easily just be our perception.

It’s like we’re stuck on a train, with only a rear window, traveling at a constant speed forever. We can always look back and see from where we came, but we have no idea how the track turns up ahead, or even if it will be running for much longer. How ignorant must we look to an observer who can see the track in its entirety? To something not bound by our limited perception of time, its idea of the universe would be quite different than ours.

But maybe it’s good that we suffer this “limited perspective” of ours. When you’re only around for less than a century, the only appreciable wonder we can experience in the universe is each other. The Earth, the stars, space, and time are not going to give a damn about what you or I do with the rest of our lives, but the people around us will.

Friends will come and go, love, hate, death… all complex and powerful forces that we, in our limited perspective, can nearly get a hold of and experience them as they change and evolve throughout our lives. Could somebody who can skip around galaxies on a whim really appreciate something as delicate and fragile as love?

So maybe we don’t have that limited of a perspective after all? Maybe the most impressive things to witness in the universe are the relationships and emotions we experience with others happening right here on this frail little blue marble spinning around one lonely little star…

The thing is, there’s no excuse for doing your job poorly… but especially if you have an easy-ass job. For instance:

The movie ticket-taker person: An exhaustively simple job, free from any real stress save standing around for hours at a time. Take the tickets, tear the stub, and say “left” or “right” to direct the movie-going patrons to their respective theaters. Can’t really mess that up right? Wrong. The other day, I went to go see Wanted with Anita… and our ticket taker SUCKED. Not only did he not greet us (kindly or otherwise), he struggled to tear the tickets (slowly)… and then left it to our own deductive abilities to determine which side of the theater to go to. It was rough.

Another popular variant is the fast-food cashier that not only rings your order up incorrectly, but then seems upset when they have to get the manager’s authorization to rectify their mistake. The best is when you ask for extra ranch sauce and they act like it’s the most arduous task ever… sauntering over two feet to the “sauce rack” (or whatever) and laboriously selecting the requested flavor packets before disdainfully slamming them down on your tray.

“Will that be all?” they ask. Yes. That is all. THANKS.

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.

Unfortunately, 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.

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?

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.

To wrap it all up, the new bar in West Campus, Cuatros, was playing some very chill summer music… and then (in the most cliché way imaginable) two midriff-bearing and very cute girls run by listening to their iPods. It was like the beginning scene to some shitty summer movie… where an impossibly high number of interesting things happen in sync along the main character’s path for 5 minutes while nothing important occurs so the movie can have the intro credits roll.

Of course, this picturesque scene was rudely interrupted by my own annoyingly acute awareness that I have two finals left to take before I can even remotely pretend it’s really summer. The jarring context switch that was falling out of my day-dreaming state was the mental equivalent of getting sucker-punched in the dick.

Anyway… I’ve got a final in 1.33333333 hours and I’m camped out in an abandoned classroom getting in some last-minute cram time whilst longingly looking out the window at the multi-million-dollar Gregory pool complex. Time to get back to studying…

My sleep schedule will slosh around throughout the week… stretching inevitably towards an unbelievably out-of-phase cycle that might more closely resemble somebody’s day in China than it would a person’s in Austin. Even for a college engineering student, the last glowing digits I see from my alarm clock as I finally get to sleep mockingly remind me how screwed up my circadian rhythms are.

I also eat like shit the majority of the time… and I feel this is largely due to my impressively unpredictable schedule. When you get hungry at 5:30 AM, 90% of the time you’ll end up eating something that exchanges nutritional value for taste and/or ease of preparation. Some days, I’ll realize rather indifferently that I haven’t eaten anything all day, and then proceed to superficially satiate my hunger with some less-than-healthy meal, or half-assedly eat a small snack only to perpetuate my permafucked eating schedule for a few more hours.

My regularly scheduled workout routine from last semester has all been for not… as my infrequent and irregular visits to the gym serve only to unabashedly remind me that I am a fatass.

Yes… I have a shit ton of work to do. Yes, this is the most work I’ve ever had to do for school… ever. But there really isn’t any real reason as to why everything in my life has to been so shitty.

Regardless of the reason, I can only hope that the summer will bring change. Working a 9-to-5 will help regulate my sleep schedule, and unless I want to emerge at the end of August as a fat, pale, all-too-true-to-an-engineer’s-stereotype BITCH… then my fat ass will get in gear at the gym and the pool. With nothing to do besides work, I have no excuse to stand idle and let my life continue to be a chaotic mess of tangled biological absurdities.

The summer (and change) cannot come soon enough.

Four three-hour slots that would be spent hating my life and wishing I had learned more during the semester, as well as hours and hours of studying and cramming at the last minute… times four. Four finals sounds pretty bad.

My VHDL design class has a policy for exempting the final… but I just narrowly missed the requirements. My test average had to be a B or above (check), I had to be making a B or above in the class with all 3 tests averaged in (check), and had to make a B or better on all the tests (whoops… damn you test #2).

So I played the numbers game of making an Excel spreadsheet that let me plug in numbers for my final to see what my semester grade would be. With my average being what it was, and the final only counting 25%, I would make a B in the class if I made anywhere between a 68 and a 100. GREAT.

Anybody in college has experienced the phenomenon of selectively throttling their effort on the final. Basically… the probability of the last test raising your grade a letter should entirely determine the amount of effort you should put into studying. The situation in my VHDL class is a perfect example… when a C on the final will get me the same final grade as a perfect score would… why study my ass off?

I was continuing to dick around in Excel when I got an email from the professor revising the final exemption policy… and it was like music to my ears.

“You are eligible to skip finals if test average is 80 and no more than one test less than 80%.”

SWEET.

And then there were three.

My status? Well, with ¾ of a Red Bull making its way through my guts, I’m continuing to charge ahead into the uncharted territories of compiler code generation and processor pipelining simulation (2 of my 3 final projects). For the last few days, all I have been able to see has been a sea of C-code, expanding before me like a vast and endless ocean of line after line of absolutely unintelligible shit like:

int GetPointerSize (SYMBOL s)
{
   /*
   ** let's hope none of these are null...
   ** or we are completely FUCKED
   */
    return s->datatype->datatype->datatype->size;
}

It’s so hard to even care at this point… with the enticing allure of care-free summer days creeping into my mind, the last week of school seems to be waging a losing battle for my attention.

However, if given a small enough time frame, almost anything can have the appearance of being important. Right now, these projects are consuming my life, and are soon to be followed by four mind-blowingly difficult finals, but 5 years down the line… how much will all of this really matter?

Nevertheless, I’ve got shit to do.

And now that I’ve finished the Red Bull, it’s time to wrap up this post. If Red Bull really gave me wings, I’d fly away from my computer to an island where the only trees are things that grow out of the ground and the only risk for storage leaks comes from old rusty containers.

The concept of entropy for anybody not familiar with it, is that everything in the universe will tend to a disordered state over time, and that any system with a high amount of order is more than likely going to turn into chaos soon. Basically– order is fragile and unlikely.

An example is a pyramid stack of crystal wine glasses. The system is highly ordered… and thus it takes only a small amount of energy input before the system reaches a state of high entropy (in the form of shattered glass on the floor). Also, we would never expect broken glass to fall into the shape of stacked wine glasses; entropy is a one way street.

In fact, on of the bleakest potential fates of the universe what’s known as the “heat death”, in which the universe enters state of maximum entry… basically perfectly distributed heat in all space. With no perturbations, there is no potential for information or information processing, so no life of any form. But you’d have to wait around for another 10⁴⁰ years… when all protons will have decayed and all that’s left in the universe is black holes.

Anyway– I say I’m a fan because… order is boring. I also have the 10-year-old-kid tendency of doing my best to help the universe out by adding my own entropy to things. For instance:

I like to knock over, spill, break, destroy, and generally mess up lots of things. I never really grew out of that I guess? But also– order is boring in regards to people. I like to stir up people’s ideas and long-held ideals by challenging them to think about why they think certain things. I don’t like to persuade people to change their minds as much as I like to just poke around their brains a bit.

I also enjoy saying things in conversations purposefully to get people rilled up. All in good fun though… nothing that will deeply offend anybody (usually), but just enough to set about a chain of events that will lead to a slightly more interesting outcome than if I had stuck to the norm.

Why? Because order is boring. So do your part in helping the universe along its destined path and add some entropy to your life!

Backing up a bit further to set the scene: Derek, Anita, and Nate are in my room jacking around, horse playing, etc. on my bed. I get a phone call so I step out to the living room to try and escape from the childish yelling and screaming.

My desk… was a great deal at the time. Twenty dollars via craig’s, and it fit exactly in my room and exactly for my equipment. Unfortunately, it had the structural integrity of a straw hut in a category-5 hurricane.

So anyway, I hear a spectacular crash from inside my room, and quickly the three of them fall silent. When I walk in, my worst fears had been realized…

And that would be the aftermath. Actually that’s the next morning, in the process of cleaning up… this picture is the real aftermath. My room is supposed to look something like this, but somehow somebody got thrown (?) into my desk hard enough to cause the middle section to collapse, taking my stereo amp, mixer, PodXT, PS2, picture frame, etc. with it.

Luckily, nothing was damaged besides a few scrapes on the equipment and wall. And yes, I was pissed. But like I said, nothing was really damaged, and I took the opportunity to take all of my crap out of my desk and dust/clean it before reorganizing it.

The moral of the story? The robustness of your desk should be proportional to your friends tendency to be rambunctious.

Lesson learned.