Archive for the ‘games nerds play’ Category
Housecleaning and Upgrading
Doing some housecleaning around the ole’ server, and getting around to upgrading WordPress. Wish me luck. And if you happen to stop by and it looks goofy — that’s why.
Of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Google
Among the geek mainstream, if not the geek congnoscenti, it seems, if I may speak generally, (and it’s my blog, so I shall) Microsoft equals "bad." Google equals "good." Yahoo? It probably equal’s "meh." I’m putting these terms in quotes, as I believe in this case, they are all relative terms.
Why? Google is a ginormous, for-profit, public corporation, and as such, it’s primary goal is to make money for its shareholders. Ditto Microsoft. So why is Google "cool" while other corporate entities are not, even labeled by some as "evil?" Particularly when it looks more and more like the Google technical hegemony is the one we should be worrying about.
Disclosure: I admit, Google has become one of my favorite punching bags, if for no other reason than I just tend to be suspicious of something that everyone else loves to the point of near lunacy. It is the default setting for the the relevant DIP switch in my brain.
Upgrading WordPress …
If it looks wonky, this is probably why. Wish me luck. … *crosses fingers*
Update: Woot! Got the WP software updated with no probs. Now tinkering with a new theme …
Update: 2; late 11/12: Cool theme huh? Props to this young Dutchman and his WordPress Theme generator. Those of us too lazy to take the time write their own code thank you.
Hey, I’ve got news and fiction to write (no, they’re not one and the same, thank you very much, unless you mean Fox News, then yes, it is), and photos to take and edit. Not to mention the fact that I have to tinker with HTML and whatnot during working hours. If I wanted to spend all my time coding HTML I would have listend to my father and majored in computer science, after all. So yeah, Yvo and the WordPress theme generator rule.
I <3 Sartre, Comrades! Shall We Wait for Godot?
Ah, I’ve come circle; I’m no longer morose and melancholy over a) the election, b) the financial meltdown, and c) the government’s subsequent bailout. It’s gone beyond mystifying and transcended to the realm of the absurd … the insanely absurd. The Absurd with a capital A. I feel like my brain broke and that intead of witnessing and participating in reality, I’m in a French existential comedy – the world has transcended, or rather descended, into a work by Sartre or Camus. Maybe Beckett.
Dubya comes on the television and says in order to save the free market the government has to use taxpayer money to buy shares in private banks. So … we need socialism to preserve the free market? We have to partially nationalize private banks in order to save them? We had to burn down the village in order to save it?
We got into this mess by people living beyond their means, and people banking – literally – on the fact that people were doing this. So, we have to use taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street so banks will extend credit again – so the same people whose tax money is being used for the bail out can continue to live beyond their means, and investment bankers can continue to get rich off of them. And the best part of it is, the people in charge of implementing this bailout were, up until a few years ago, investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, making money hand over fist from sub-prime mortages – in other words, some of the same folk that got us into this mess have been tasked with getting us out of it.
Technorati Tags: election, bailout, Absurd, Sartre, Camus, Beckett
Posted in games nerds play, literature, politics | 
Tags: bailout, election, mccain, obama, presidential campaign | 
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