2011-06-04 - A General Update

To start off with, I have a job. That’s right I have a job. I’m not entirely comfortable saying that because I’m worried that I’ll be correct and that would be disappointing. Anyways, I am fairly certain that I have a job. It’s a fairly simple job, mostly outdoor work doing whatever needs to be done for a little sub-division of townhouses full of old people. It’s alright, nice people, and I’m learning valuable home upkeep knowledge. HURRAH FOR LEARNINGS!

In other news my programming book arrived a week ago, it only took two months. So when I’m not working I can be learning about the win32 API. It’s a very well written book, detailed without being boring. I’ve uploaded a few pictures of some programs to the picture section and will add more as I make them. I also got another small book about engineering and such, good times. HURRAH FOR MORE LEARNINGS!

In site news I updated the picture section and the comic section a bit. Most of the pictures s and a good portion of the comics should now have notes. You can also click on all the pictures and some of the older comics to see their full size. In the comic section I also wrote descriptions for most of the comics. Some of the random comics don’t have notes but I’ll get to them eventually. As previously mentioned I have added some pictures to the programming section I have also added some new ones to the misc section. Also also I have now made is to that when you post a comment not only is it added to the site it is also emailed to me. That way I don’t have to check to see if there are any new comments.

So all in all I say that May has been a success.

2011-05-24 - Vegetarians Hate Animals

Those damn hippies who refuse to eat animal products because it’s not nice really hate animals. Now you might say that this is a lie and to you I say it isn’t and you’re wrong. Now I don’t mean the people who don’t eat meat for religious or medical reasons. Religious people are just crazy in general and medical reasons rather trump everything. No, I am talking about hippies, hippies who don’t like the livestock industry and have decided to protest it with a boycott. Those people really hate animals. If they don’t hate animals then they have a serious misunderstanding about animals and basic economics principles.

So the argument goes as such “Farms are mean to animals”, or something like that. I haven’t actually listened to any of their arguments because I think they are all silly but it seems to be something along those lines. Now my rebuttal to that is that it would be stupid for farms to be mean to animals. A farm is a business and businesses want to make money. You don’t make money by wasting time being cruel to your animals, especially when you get the most money out of your animals when they are big, fat and happy. Just think about it, if someone is hurting you will eating be the first thing on your mind? It is more likely you will be trying to escape or strike back and just generally being stressed out. Now as I understand it a stressed out animal doesn’t taste that good and neither will it produces a lot of meat. They will be especially losing money if it’s trying to break free and damaging itself and property in the process. Now since producing meat is what the farmer wants, it seems to me that being nice to their animals is in a farmers best interests. That way they are all big and meaty and he can sell them for lots of money.

Now there are some rather creepy factory farms, farms with hundreds of chickens in a row laying eggs with weird light cycles to cause them to overproduce Now as much as these are creepy they are not necessarily cruel. They still have to take care of their animals because their animals are what make them money. Now I am not a supporter of these kinds of farms because there are better ways to do things. That being said it doesn’t help to protest the entire industry. If you would never eat eggs then there is no profit to be lost by housing chickens in a manner you support. It’s much better to give your money to other companies, companies that are less creepy. It’s a supply and demand business; if you are not contributing to demand supply won’t care what you think. If you are contributing to a specific segment of demand supply will follow you. This is the generally problem with the whole vegetarian movement. If you’re not going to eat animal products then why should they bend to your ideals?

Now there’s a second stage to the livestock industry that also gets a lot of flack. I’m talking about the butchers and others that kill animals and take the bits that they want. Now the argument about these groups seems to be related to the way in which they kill the animals. Vegetarians seem to have the idea that they beat them to a pulp and then spit on them for added effect. Now again my rebuttal is that this is entirely stupid. You see time is money and property is money. Since you don’t want to waste time or property the best way to kill an animal is the quickest and least destructive way. This allows you to get at the bits you need as soon as possible without damaging any of those bits or any of your buildings and tools. Cows are large and when they are jerking around in pain from being beaten it is very likely that they could hurt someone or something which would cost the company money. Since the company wants to spend as little as possible and make as much as possible it simply makes sense to avoid this.

Now back to the real reason that vegetarians hate animals, or how they indirectly hate animals without knowing it. The thing is that vegetarians hate farmers and butchers because they feel that they are mistreating their animals. Now I’ve already talked about how misguided this is but for a moment let’s assume they are right and get rid of them. What happens to the animals? Most livestock animals have been domesticated for so many generations that they wouldn’t know how to survive in the wild. When was the last time you saw a wild cow? Domesticated animals don’t know how to care for themselves. They wouldn’t know how to find food and water because farmers always gave it to them. They wouldn’t know how to find shelter from the elements because farmers always gave to them. They wouldn’t know how to protect themselves from predators because farmers always did it for them. They wouldn’t know how to survive and subsequently wouldn’t. Good going vegetarians, I hope that you are happy now with all the pigs, cows and chickens of the world dead.

And another thing, what do they have against fish? As I understand the vegetarian lifestyle it’s okay to eat fish which makes no sense. A fish is an animal, its flesh is meat. Eating a fish is no different than eating a cow or a big. It’s still an animal that was killed and removed from its peaceful life so that you could eat it. I mean what the hell?

2011-05-18 - Job Hunt

I’m working on writing something else but it’s not done yet. Well actually it is done but I’m trying this thing called “editing” where you read something over and over again to make sure it’s good. I’m not quite sure about it but we’ll see. Anyways, as an aside I want to talk about jobs.

I don’t think I have the qualities needed to find a job. I have the qualities to do most jobs or at least to learn how to do most jobs but not those to find one. The problem I think is that I like to see progress in things that I do. When working on a problem the wrong solution tells you just as much as the right one. You learn from the process and from failures, they help you to understand things better and to figure out the right solution. However Job hunting doesn’t work like that, most roads don’t lead anywhere and those that do tend to end abruptly without anything being gained. You go through the process of finding a job and then applying to that job only to find an empty email inbox or a quiet phone. There’s no way of knowing the status of anything or the reasoning behind your application being ignored. Even if you do get to go for an interview they rarely give you any idea of what you did right and what you did wrong. Even if they do tell you something you tend to be talking to HR people who are skilled in the art of not telling you things when you think they did. They may tell you they’ll call you but then they never do and you have no idea why. It’s a whole lot of waiting for things that may never come without anything to gain from the experience.

Sadly no one ever tells you about that life enriching time they spent trying to find a job. You know I remember someone saying insanity is repeating something over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time. That sounds like job hunting to me.

2011-05-09 - RSS feeds

I have made an RSS feed. I actually made it a few days ago but haven’t gotten around to posting about it until now. I’ve been sick and lazy and those kinds of things, but I’m here now so yeah. RSS feeds are actually surprisingly easy to do. It’s just an xml document that sits at the root of the website and store information. Whenever I write something new I add another entry to it and upload it along with the other changes. If you subscribe to the RSS feed whenever I do an update like that it will tell you that I’ve done an update like that. What could be easier? It’s like checking the site without ever checking the site which is useful because I’m lazy and rarely update the site. Oh, it also might be my birthday or something.

EDIT: The biggest problem with RSS feeds so far is figuring out what time it is in GMT on a 24 hour clock. To simplify things I figured I’d just set all the previous entries to be at 00:00:00. The problem with this is that midnight GMT is actually 6 pm the night before here which means all the dates were off. So now they are 6 GMT and 0 here and it’s all good. Then I went and set today’s entry as 10 instead of 22. Time is fun.