A good friend of mine was telling me when we were in highschool that people are made out of different personalities, each alive and fighting for control. He called them rather pompously infrapersonalities. They all define you in some way or another and the "you" is not a simple sum, but a warped weighted average.

Taking the reasoning further, I reached the conclusion that the way we perceive other people is also encapsulated in a hostage personality that describes that person. We don't relate to the actual people, but with our projection of them. Of course, that applies to everything, not just people, but it's besides the point I am trying to make.

What if you spend a lot of time defining such a person? Doesn't it mean the associated infrapersonality "gains weight"? It becomes more alive inside you. There is even a disorder when people switch from one dominant personality to another.

But what if you had feelings for that person? Could its infrapersonality remain alive, evolving separately inside you? Of course it could. And then, why can't you retain the feelings you had for that person if it is alive and so close to you?

I end my reasoning here. I completely pass the (important) point that even if you do love a living and existing person it is still a feeling related to an internal representation of that person. At least it gets updated. Can one projection of another person make you continue to be in love with it, in the absence of that person? I think it can. Worse, I think it is happening to me, and that makes me (even more than you possibly thought) in love with myself. Bummer, huh?

It just occurred to me that the biggest problem on Earth is not war, but the unending talks that come afterwards. Therefore, I propose a UN resolution that bans war. If any country starts a war without being sanctioned by the UN, it is to pay. And pay a lot. No, the answer is not military retaliation or anything, but money. Each unsanctioned war day is to cost between 10 and 100 million EUROs.

The solution is both simple and elegant. If you need to start a blitzkrieg, do it, just make sure to pay afterwards. You want to go to a country, bomb its infrastructure, steal its oil? No problem, just make sure you win more than you pay to the UN. You want to stall the peace talks? Ok, but do it on your own money. You don't agree to pay? Just forget about exporting or importing anything.

Of course, there is a catch. Lately, no conflict was called a war. Therefore a clear definition of it is also required. That would help mentally challenged leaders to use the right words, too. What's my definition of war? Any conflict outside your borders perpetrated by the national armed force.

What about Hezbollah? you will ask. They attack outside the Lebanon borders and are not the official national armed force. They should be off the hook. Yes, you heard me right. Israel wants retaliation, do it with a private force of people payed or otherwise motivated to do so. In other words: pay for it!

And if you don't want to pay, ask the UN, NATO, or any other legitimate international force to sanction your need for blood or solve your problems or whatever. We can't wait for politicians to solve a problem WHILE the problem exists. They move slow, they have no foresight and their hindsight is limited to what helps them look good. Use preemptive measures: any war costs. Don't forget that the military and the politicians are ruled by the same type of people that rules everybody today: suits! The modern name for aristocracy. And they only care about one thing: money!

Gibson arrest 'handled correctly'

This is a rant marginally related to the Holocaust sucks post. Let me first say that I am NOT against the jewish people, even if I strongly think the Israeli external policy is a dark shameful spot on the face of humanity in general.

There are some words or attitudes that are socially not cool, politically incorrect, or whatever you want to call them. For example talking about fascists or terrorists as bad people is good. Talking about Jews as bad people is not good. Using 'nigger' when you're white is not good, but as a black man it's completely ok. I wonder if it's ok to say it if you're Asian. Of course, this is all bullcrap. People have the right to say what they think and not be persecuted by it. Eventually, if a behaviour is determined by society to be wrong, then it should be punished or looked down upon in ALL its manifestations.
My main focus today will be antisemitism. First of all, the very word annoys the hell out of me, Semites are Jews as well as Arabs and some other nationalities. To hijack the term to mean almost exclusively racism against Jews is discriminating in itself. Second of all, there is no need for a special word that describes racism against a single race or group of races. We've determined that racism is bad and that antisemitism is racism, so why use two words? Is it because, somehow, idiots think hating Jews is worst than hating Romanians, for example? And third of all, have you noticed that the most "opressed" of nationalities usually have a strong xenophobic culture, almost always having a special word for people that are not like them? The Jews have Goim, which means People and also Body. They very rarely use it in relationship with jewish people and most of the time only to refer to non-Jews. They also have specific other words that mean non-Jewish. They don't use kind words about Goim either. But I guess that's not racism, because they actually look down upon all races equally, except their own. In a way, they discriminate themselves, right?
So my solution is this: let us consider any racist remark a bad thing, while in the same time consider idiotic and not worth any attention any phrase or argument that contains "antisemitic". That would solve it, right?

Just now I watched a little youtube.com video that explained the two slit experiment. Basically, what happends is that a pattern emerges if you use waves and another when you use particles. Then you fire electrons in the thing, and wave patterns emerge, even if you fire one electron at a time, therefore the single electron is interfering with itself! But even stranger, when you put an observer to see what slit the electron goes through, the pattern changes into a particle pattern. This proves that observation changes what we observe.

Wait a minute! But isn't science supposed to be based on observation? This very experiment has been observed, for crying out loud. So what does it mean? If you demonstrate something by scientific experimentation, therefore using observation, doesn't that mean you only demonstrate what happends when you look at something, rather than what that something is? Since the same experiment has been observed using eyes and it behaved differently when they use a finer tool, then it means the type of observer alters the result. Would things start behaving differently if an alien was to come on Earth? This is mind boggling.

Links:
YouTube video -< it was removed from YouTube
Another YouTube video
Wikipedia on the double slit experiment
Cool java applet on wave interference

Do you know how some games have so much publicity spin on them and so much advertising that they immediately start making money and becoming "the most popular game"? Arx Fatalis is not one of those. This game is a rediscovery of the good old values of Ultima Underworld: good story, great playability, nice AI, very little or no getting stuck possibilities, fantastic immersion in another world. If you loved Ultima Underworld (which can be found free on the net, but I am not sure you can make it work on the newest computers around), you will definitely fall in love with Arx Fatalis. I am telling you, I am hooked. I finished the game in a working week and two weekends and I did it so fast because my wife wanted me to give some attention to her. Yes, you read right, Arx Fatalis IS better than sex.

You can get it very cheaply from Good Old Games.

Ok, what is so great about it? I will give a few hints and let you discover the rest for yourselves:

• you make magic by mouse gestures (you move the mouse in certain patterns, like in Black and White)
  
• the AI characters yell for help from associated NPCs and run away when too hurt
  
• I once ran into an impenetrable beast that could kill me with one touch. Running away from it I reached a dead end. I expected to find no way out, but the beast disappeared and reappeared a few feet behind, just enough to let me run away.
  
• I couldn't find ONE spot where I would have gotten stuck in the entire game.
  
• the quests are intelligent. You need to use brains to finish this one. It's not something that must be searched on google to finish, either. If you have the will, there is a way.
  
• you can kill almost every character in the game as well as finish their quests.
  
• a lot of side quests. You can finish the game in a week or in a few months, it depends on you.
  
• hidden magic spells. Each rune has a specific meaning. Try combining them in innovative ways.
  

Not interested yet? Oh, come on!

Update: I have found a Doom3 mod that tries to be a prequel to Arx Fatalis. A pretty neat effort and I am glad I found a new reason to upgrade my computer :). This is their site: Arx – End Of Sun and this is a gameplay video: Arx - End of Sun (Gameplay Video #1) [Doom 3 SP Mod].

Mark's Sysinternals Blog

I hope this is something Microsoft did in order to improve their products, but I fear that the only reason for this purchase is to shut down the sites that give for free better tools than the one Microsoft puts in their OS. If this happends, I'll just move to Cygwin and ports from Linux for system tools X(

Nowadays Indigo seems to be a classy name. Everything is Indigo, from WCF to skins for every possible program or device. The new beta for Yahoo Messenger comes with the classic skin (aka Old Windows Forms style), Indigo (something that looks like Windows XP) and Maverick. Even if I changed my skin to classic, every time I restarted Yahoo I got the Indigo skin back. The only solution I found for this is going to Program Files/Yahoo!/Shared/Graphics and delete/rename the Indigo and Maverick folders. Now Yahoo looks and feels like the low profile/high utility app that it's supposed to be.

"How can you say that, Siderite, since all your rants are typical intellectual rants and you are obviously one?" writes a loyal blog reader.

Well, loyal reader, only reader and also writer of this blog, I also suck! Yes. Writing a blog that basically helps no one except for the programming tips, for the main purpose of being read by anyone, shows that I suck big time. And I am not the only one. Forums and blogs are sprouting all over the net, an infestation marketed as Web 2.0, basically saying absolutely nothing useful. The writers usually start blogging for the same reason that young girls write diaries, then "accidentally" leave them so anyone can read them. The opinion of people we don't care about and that normally should not care about us should be irrelevant, but the human need for self affirmation seems to counteract this obvious logic.

And I've realised this (well, finally at a conscious level) by reading these small magazines that are free and left to be read in bars and restaurants. They contain a few articles, targeting medium or high income young adults, as most of the clientele of this places is, and written by intellectuals. The rest of the pages are filled, of course, with commercials and ads. I first got interested, because the things that these guys said resonated with my own thoughts. Then I realized that they only did so with negative thoughts, talking about how the world is and shouldn't be and the adjacent sarcasm and intelligent irony. They didn't really provide useful solutions; and the more I read them, the more they sounded like whining.

So it hit me! These people have no reason to write anything to others. They only express their own impotence as members of the most elitist and minority group: intellectuals. They are intelligent, they read a lot, know a lot, and can't do anything about it. They are surrounded by idiots and the world these idiots create and the only possible thing to do about it is BLOG! (as in rant, using any media they can access). And because their opinion is nothing more than a sad whine, with no effect whatsoever, they suck. And so do I!

Why Windows takes so long to shut down.

Now this is a nice article that just touches my soul. How many of us, computer geeks have been at the mercy of the Windows shutdown? How many minutes wasted staring blindly into the monitor for that simple but elusive power off?

I have installed the Hive Cleanup Service and it mostly works. However, I can't say that it provides with the instant shutdown that I was looking for and I have no idea if the fact that my computer shuts down regularily now is due to this software, but it certainyl didn't hurt my computer in any way.

Profile of the Sociopath

This link is a short summary of the psychological profile of a sociopath. Having dealt with at least two in my life, and with one when I was least prepared for it (Grrr!), I kinda stumbled over this. As a paranthesis, search on Google for cult leaders and their psychological profile. Some weird event from your adolescence or the strange behaviour of your child can be sometimes explained by the influence of sociopathy and cultism.

If you read carefully the link above, a pattern forms and a profile of a sociopath emerges. Are they many in society today? And asking myself that I noticed that this profile fits a lot of women almost like a glove. Don't believe me? Read it for yourself. Of course, it doesn't ALL fit, else we would be in big trouble, but I started wondering, as the defining characteristic of psychopats is the incapacity for love and shallow emotions, how do women feel? Could that be an explanation for the way we can't understand the opposite sex, while they understand us perfectly? Could it also explain while we get mad rather rarely, but intensely, while they seem to get enraged after all kind of stupid things, then quickly get over it? Do they really love? These are questions that stuck with me for days.

Of course, a general and simple answer doesn't exist. If I look closely, a lot of those traits fit me as well. Does it mean I am a sociopath, coolly manipulating my blog readers? I just might :D

What can be better than a rant on IT matters? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, VS2005 sucks! Compiling anything takes twice the time it took before, loading it takes 3 times as long as VS2003, resources used are also doubled.
This is not something unexpected from Microsoft, just check out the evolution of the Windows operating system, doubling in size like following a sick Moore law, but this is a developer tool, it is supposed to enhance productivity. I don't even know what I would do without ReSharper.
They also had this idea, which I think it's not bad, of trying to make VS an universal platform for any developer tool. This makes sense if you consider it all started from Visual InterDev. However, if this is not done with the limited resources of developers in mind, it will only annoy people. Who cares Visual Studio 2005 can integrate the team manager stuff, the code, the html, the css, the sql, if I only want to make a small console application and I have to wait 5 minutes for my handy tool to start? It sounds a lot like Weird Al Yankovic's It's All About the Pentiums.

Yeah, baby, the World Sucks series is back with a new season. This episode is about smokers and, yes, they suck. And this goes beyond their obsessive need to put something long and slim in their mouth and suck on it.
Smokers suck for only one true reason: they don't care. Everyday I am exposed to tobacco smoke and none of the people that are actually smoking seem to care that other people have to breathe that foul smelling odor. When I go to work on my way to the subway, when I get back home, on the subway stairways (yes, don't wait another 20 seconds you fucking junkies, light the cigarette right in front of me on the conveyor stairs!), in my own home when I open the window and some neighbour decided to smoke the very next window.
I admit, smoking inside your own house should be ok and if the wind brings the smoke into my home, well, it happends. But it's just the last drop in the bucket, is there no safe place? I now understand the glue sniffing beggars that retreated in the subway to live an underground life; it's the only safe haven.
So there you have it: smokers suck, and it is so obvious to me that I don't even feel angry anymore. The only thing I can associate smoking with is farting. Someone farts, the others have to smell it. But who in the world sympathizes with a person that enjoys the smell of their own farts?

Rant alert! This time I am not sure what or who sucks, so I'll just ask the questions and let you figure out the answers.

Today, in Bucharest, a gay parade was kept to celebrate the removal of article 200 from the Constitution, an article that made homosexuality illegal. Of course, right wing, religious, or just plain conservative people held their own demonstration and todays gay parade was attacked and ended in violence.

That made me think of this gay thing. It never occured to me that it was an issue. Lately, though, I am seeing it everywhere, from movies like Brokeback Mountain and New York style films to scientific reports that say 1 in 10 people is gay. That means that somewhere in my highschool class there were three gay people, for example, and I know of none.

I have no gay thoughts and I might just as well admit a little homophobia. But would I mind seeing people expressing their homosexuality in public, for example? I am sure some instinctual disgust would appear, but I am human, I should be able to get above my instincts. Besides, homophobic feelings, as strong as they may be, they can't be stronger than a persons sexual orientation, can they? Why should these people be forced to fight their own emotions?

On the other hand, another part of me protests violently. I don't want to see men French kissing on the street, touching their bottoms with their hands. I want things to be as they were, I like them like this. Yet, things were not very different for kissing boys and girls a few years ago. Romania being a conservative orthodox society, with a lot of people outrooted by communists from their homes in the country to come to the big industrial cities, young boys and girls showing physical affection for each other were frowned upon. I can remember how mad that made me feel.

Where do we draw the line? It is a weird line, I can tell you that. A lot of things can be seen in public in Romania. Dirty smelly beggars for example, roaming the transport system (for free I might add, while we pay the fare); loud music in the night from people listening to it on their powerful car stereos; extremely annoying comercials, people with flyers or cars that play very loudly some radio music to make you pay attention to the slogans on their sides. So why not gay people? I would certainly like to be in a bus full of kissing men than in a bus of smelly sick beggars.

A few minutes ago an idea came to my mind. Maybe people aren't against homosexuals, maybe it all started from a misunderstood word. You know when you're all lonely and depressed and you see people being happy and together and you feel a strong feeling of anger and annoyance? I think that in all countries people are mostly unhappy. Therefore, as democracy has it, in the early history they forbid gayness. People were not allowed to be gay in public, it made depressed people even more depressed. Then homosexuals chose the word to represent them and it all got mixed up.

So, my conclusion is that to be gay means nothing to me. I can live with the level of annoyance gay people might produce in me and I think they should do whatever they want and be able to express themselves. But then again, I think the same thing about right wing activists, fascists, communists and arab terrorists. Free speech should be truly free, and I would extend this to free expression.

I got it! Laws against freedom of expression suck! They might be gay, also :)

I spoke about it in a previous post and I realised that this is an important issue, not just a side note. I never learned about it in school, nor did a lot of my friends. I've researched it and I found out that it's not in the American history books either. It's not even Spanish, it came from the US, and as Spain was not in the war at the time, they didn't have war time censorship and talked freely about it. That's why it came to be known as Spanish. Funny enough, in Spain it was called the French Flu.

But what was it? How did it happen? Apparently it was a type of avian influenza, just like the one we panic so much now, it emerged in an American military fort, then it spread as the soldiers were moved from place to place. When they came to fight in Europe, it spread there as well. The effects are very swift destruction of lung tissue which causes the patient to drown in his own fluids and the flu affected more the young and the fit, not the old people.

Opinions are divided, some say as much as 100 million people have died, while others give a more conservative value of 40-50 million. Compare that with the 16 million people killed in the entire World War I which just ended, and you realise the magnitude of the issue.

So, again, why have so little people heard about it? It is a horrible disaster, yet it is treated as a historical side note. I haven't heard of one movie that used it as a script idea. What is going on? Was the "war time censorship" so efficient? But then why did it not emerge as a huge thing afterwards?

As a history drive it was extremely powerful, for example US president Wilson who negociated the end of the war had it. Maybe if he had been stronger mentally, he wouldn't had let Clemenceau, the French counterpart, have his way in imposing harsher conditions on Germany. That, in turn, could have reduced the German motivation for starting World War II.

Even more interesting is how the disease disappeared. They didn't really have a cure for it, it just vanished, after killing so many. The mortality rate was rather small, too. The new avian influenza has a 66% kill ratio in humans so far.

Third episode from the internationally acclaimed series World that Sucks.
Normally, the good hearted person that I am (yeah, right) would flinch at the idea that 6 million people were moved to special extermination camps and, well, exterminated. But when we talk the Jewish Holocaust, I just can't feel anything. They whined and continue to whine so much about this, that it lost all appeal. That they do almost the same thing with Palestinians is just the tip of the iceberg.
What offends me even more are the number of Hollywood movies and other types of popular shows that are shedding crocodile tears over this. OK, it happened. More atrocious things also happened. A lot more Russians died in the same war, does anybody cry for them? No, they were communists, fuck them! 50 million people died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. Do we hear of it anywhere else than on Discovery Channel? No.
I bet the whole Holocaust Hoax idea came from some guy that couldn't take it anymore. So much bullshit was thrown that it was impossible for any of that to be true.
So my conclusion is that the Holocaust sucks. Any mention of it, as a corollary of the Goodwin law, should end any conversation and disqualify the guy that used it (phew, good thing that this is a blog). And what is even scarier is that after a few years we'll start seeing movies about the Muslim Holocaust in Guantanamo. And if they follow the same pattern, we'll never stop seeing them. Man, that would really suck!