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… your parents wedding? Pearl Harbor? Being at a tropical beach? Your funeral?

Chances are, unless you are a completely literal person, you could. However I’m sure that that isn’t a remarkable fact to anyone really. Anyways, I’ve been thinking about conciousness today. Strange, yes, but obviously electrical engineering major, building robots, running websites, traveling down to Buies Creek, taking pictures, playing the mandolin, and whatnot isn’t keeping me busy enough.

So, what’s so special about the previous instances? Well, I find it utterly remarkable that your conciousness – your immaterial mind – is able to 1) create an “I” and 2) move that “I” through both time and space. Think about it. You didn’t exist when your parents got married (well … lets assume), you’ve never seen your funeral, and you probably aren’t on a tropical beach. Your mind just created an immaterial copy of who you are and then moved that person in time back to the time when your parents go married. In essence it created an immaterial universe and then manipulated it so that you, your “I”, moved to that point in time and space. I find that remarkable.

Regardless, there is plenty of evidence that your mind is seperate, yet linked, to your physical body. Sometime I may go into it more, but the point is seperation lends itself to remarkable yet commonplace results. My mind can seperate from my brain – My Self can operate independantly from my physical. We do thinks while thinking different things all the time. “out of body experiences” are a remarkable study and give much food for thought about what Me means.

I’ve also made the point of thinking about things that impact Me more than me. Music and art both seem to be a bridge between the physical and immaterial. Our emotions, which certainly aren’t completely physical, expressed in music allow the immaterial to communicate with the physical.

So much to think about.

Before you go and dismiss all this as postmoderm psychobabble just think about it. Is that the essence of much of Christian belief? The belief that there is a immaterial and a material. That the two can be transversed (see Christ), and that while seperate they are conjoined and seemingly dependent on each other.

Not a polished series of thoughts by any means, but I thought I’d share.

Go read this article:

http://www.technicianonline.com/11192003/Opinion/O1_edit.php

That was in the NCSU school paper. It was an article written by the editors of the paper. When I read that it made me furious. Does American incompetence know no bounds? I wrote the following rebuttal:

The Technician editors in Wednesday’s Viewpoint article defending same-sex marriage, defended the practice using a disturbingly incompetent argument. They say morals, what we should do, change from person to person and are irrelevant to the argument, while in the same paragraph they claim that we have a moral obligation to treat everyone equally. To say, “everyone should be treated equally,” is a moral imperative, but if morals are different for everyone why should I treat everyone equally? Aren’t you forcing your morality on me? In logic we call such an argument as this, “unsound.” This logical blunder would almost be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that so many Americans believe it. Legalizing homosexual marriage is a logically, socially, and morally indefensible position and Wednesday’s article only goes to illustrate this.

Only last week did we have another edition of “journalistic refuse” with a girl named Ashley Hinks weeping journalistic tears over the plight of the poor unloved homosexuals. They aren’t “tolerated.” They have “roadblocks” in their path. American’s don’t like homosexuals.

I wrote the following (which was printed thankfully):

Ashley Hink’s 11/13 article about homosexuals threw around a lot of
buzzwords like “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “equal rights,” but failed to
make a compelling case why those terms should include one’s sexual desires.
Traditional tolerance taught you could hold any view you wanted but you most
certainly couldn’t always act on that view. The New Tolerance has turned
that on its head and says, “Do whatever you want, but don’t you dare
believe others are wrong.” Homosexuals take great effort to say they just
want to be able to keep their bedrooms to themselves, but their actions
don’t reflect this view. Perhaps the American backlash is because
homosexuals do just the opposite – they bring their bedrooms to our TVs,
newspapers, and social dialogs. While violence is a morally reprobate
response to homosexuals, saying their behavior isn’t acceptable is a
logically and morally responsible thing to do. Challenges should always lay
in the path of wrong behavior.

I’m especially proud of that last line. Now, if only I could find people that though like that in PERSON! I’m so bummed that NCSU seems to conservative.

On another note, I ate BBQ potato chips in the rain today. It was lovely. I think it enhanced the flavor. When commenting that to a fellow student they quipped, “yeh, or else you’re on crack.”

Such love.

I’m a big fan of open source software. In fact, most anything I need to do on the computer can be accomplished with open source (free) software. The lousy economy for programmers only aids this lovelyness. So, today I’m listing some of my favorites.

One of the best places to start looking for OS stuff is on Sourceforge (sourceforge.net).

First off, I don’t get SPAM anymore. Well, I get tons of it, but I never see it. That’s because I use POPFile (POPfile.sourceforge.net). Basically it creates a mail server on your computer and your e-mail client connects to it, it connects to the external mail server. It uses smart filters that you teach how to work. It may take week or so for it to become effective. Mine is almost 99% effective now. Every now and then I check my deleted box for incorrectly identified mail. Spammers should be castrated – this is close as I can get.

Second, if you like music you should definately check out iRATE Radio (irate.sourceforge.net). It too learns about you and picks (free) music for you. It randomly downloads a play list and you rate all the songs and it starts picking music that other people rated the same as you. Kind of a collaborative music selection process. So far it’s found some decent stuff for me.

Though not open source, music lovers should also check out epitonic. Loads of free music without the aggravation of MP3.com.

For those of you that hate Microsoft I’d highly recommend downloading OpenOffice (openoffice.org). It’s a complete office suite with full Office XP compatability but it’s open source, free, and not M$. I use it for a lot stuff, since I don’t have powerpoint or excel, and it’s worked great.

You cheap java coders might want to check out Eclipse (eclipse.org) for a great IDE. Sure beats using Notepad.

After using lousy FTP clients for so long, I was thrilled to find FileZilla (filezilla.sourceforge.net) an awesome FTP program that does everything and more for free.

Again, the M$ haters should all be using Mozilla (Mozilla.org) for their browsing needs. It also has an e-mail client that has built in spam filtering.

For all your CD ripping needs I recommend CDex (aside from iTunes … (cdexos.sourceforge.net). Works quite well and extracts to lots of formats.

That’s some of the gravy I can think of off the top of my head. Check them out.

So, do these comments work?