you can see me! but I can’t see me.
Monday 4 August 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
It’s yet another wee technological wrinkle in the pancake brought to us by Qwest, who refuse to flush their DNS cache; so everyone in Christendom can now see my website but me and the Brujo, and presumably other people sharing our server. So you can comment, but I can’t log in to moderate the comments; and I’m only managing to carve out this primitive linkless post by means of the skanky youhide.com, an unappealing little corner of lurkdom.
Still, I’m lookin’ on the sunny side: The domain name has been successfully snatched from the maw of oblivion; the backed-up 2 GB/7 years of blahblah, aka Precious, is not loooost; and lots of you have gotten lots of unintentionally amusing mouth-frothing email from me.
Note to self: renew domain name for next ten years. It can outlive me, rather than put my loved ones through this again.
Yay! It’s a website! Sort of, mostly. I just can’t view it.
3 cookies in the jar
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I found myself thinking of your situation as a philosophical conundrum of sorts. I think it was Lucretius that suggested that the isolated or “natural” man would be savage and brutal but would have greater freedom and happiness and fewer vices than the civilized man. Today, however there is a tendency to picture the savage life as unstable, dangerous and insecure where, far from being happy, we would live in constant fear of death and that we are really social creatures, which loosely translates into being utterly dependent on one another for the most basic tools of survival: a woobie, a modem, a few gallons of petrol, and a large supply of Haagen Dazs. Without them are we Robinson Crusoe, a social man in isolation making solitude an object of reflection?
I was recently reading E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops,” and reflecting on just these questions. At what point do we say I am still independent? If the power went off in my home, we might be able to survive for a few days, devouring the contents of the fridge first then moving on to canned goods. Without water, that time would be cut in half. I like to think of myself as self sufficient, but it only seems to exist within the system of carefully balanced rules that have been erected around me. Without them I spend a lot of time on the phone pleading to get them back. Maybe it is this recognition of our dependence on the system and the possibility of life without it that Lucretius saw as having greater freedom and happiness? What do I know? I enjoy the irony of typing this question into my word processor.
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Editor with short attention span: Ha ha ha, you said “woobie”! Ha ha. (Marginally less dunderheaded comment here.)
Oh Interwebs—why must you mercurially rend your spite on we lowly meat-sacks. :(
Thanks for your comments—regarding the bike, I coincidentally did exactly what you said, without knowing you said it. The wifey and I were down in West Chester (near Cincy) visiting IKEA (again) and stopped by a cyclery so I could test drive some Electra bikes. It was comfortable, but not $800 comfortable. Oh well.
I test drove a few others, including a Fuji Kyoto, a couple different dutch-style bikes, a Trek, and a Giant (Tran Send DX)—ended up buying the Giant for 450 + Helmet + Tax. Nice! I’ve ridden the 12 mile round trip to work all week so far.
Sorry to hear about your back! That really sucks. If it’s a pulled/strained muscle, remember to use cool (e.g. ice pack) rather than warm (e.g. heating pad)—warmth can exacerbate inflammation and make the pain worse. I just had some agonizing back pain three weeks ago and learned that the hard way.
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Editor in an icepack: Hooray for commuting on a comfy bike! We are indeed nothing but meat.
@patrick:
I’ve often wondered about that myself.
I think about how we have all of this glorious technology, digital storage, cloud computing, massive networks of digital machinery—but if our power infrastructure suddenly fails for…say….100 years; what happens to all of that?
The UN’s blog would be just a figment in the memories of those that witnessed it, but would be no more real than the neurons whose myelinated axons were dedicated to preserving the memories. (I suppose in this case, Alzheimer’s would be quite inconvenient!)
By virtualizing more and more of our resources and society, it allows us to reach much higher elevations, but we lose our footing in reality proportionately. Future civilizations that gaze on our remains would probably not learn a whole lot about us unless they found some well-preserved tape / optical media backups somewhere—and even then, it would likely just be the financial records of some greedy corporation.
[and yes, UN, we are all glorious, self-aware meatsticks. :) Let none of us forget that we owe much of our well-being to the microbial organisms that feast on what we consume! Without those bacteria, we quite probably wouldn’t survive. Or at the very least, we would find lactose completely toxic.]
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Editorial meatstick: Yay for being a temporally located, bacterially sponsored figment…anyway for now!