Still here

Short one just to let the few folks who read this know I'm still alive.

Whats been up

1. Back in school. Last quarter of cisco.
2. Installed ubuntu on my eeepc. It now dual boots windows and ubuntu.
3. W.o.W. III. Shoulder hurt. Not much fighting for me. Got a new (for me) klappvisor bascinet ( the helm not crib).
4. Brother and his wife are having a baby. (I still prefer dogs but sometimes wonder)
5.Started on a pair of Wisby gauntlets.
6. Soaze problems cause allot of my lower back pain. (Thanks Humpty for fixing it)
7. Dreaming of Alaska.
8. Gota realize I can't save all the stray dogs in the world.

Once again here I am. A long period of time has passed since I last posted. Between school and the SCA my life has been rather busy. Last quarter was horrible for me. School sucked so much energy from me that I had no desire left to write about anything. Basically I spent all last quarter with my nose buried in an algebra book. I still failed. Well actually I received a “D” for my Herculean effort but in regard to my degree, I receive no credit; so for all intent and purpose, I failed. This quarter is much better.

I had originally planned to not talk about the SCA here, but like every other person that engages in that particular form geekdom; I too will waste bandwidth and blather about my favorite hobby, although at this point I almost have to call it a lifestyle or perhaps at least a subculture.

At this year’s rather surreal Pennsic War, I received the accolade of Knighthood within the Society. Knighthood is the highest level fighting award one can achieve within the SCA. My knight, His Grace Logan delivered my buffet. HRM Sinclair dubbed me, and now I am a knight. (Right click / save target as http://ebonwoulfe.com/images/video/brian%20knighting.wmv ) What the hell that means I am not really sure. I am of very mixed feelings about the whole thing. It is a very big deal and yet at the same time it means absolutely nothing. To quote an old saw, “A peerage and a buck fifty won’t get you a cup of coffee.” To be a knight in the SCA means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and if you ask 50 knights what a knight is, you will get 50 different answers. I suppose my first step is to figure out what it means to me. I know this much though, I count myself privileged to be considered a peer by the Order of Chivalry of the Kingdom of Atlantia. One of the best pieces of advice I received on my vigil was “Just keep doing what you have been doing. You are being Knighted because of who you are now not what you might become. And above all have fun”

I find it very strange that I have been willing to sacrifice my body and invest so much time and effort, and will continue to do so, for a game that, at its most basic, is just a bunch of grownups dressing up in really out of date clothing and beating each other senseless with rattan. But somehow out of this strange hodgepodge of Victorian Arthurianism, historical reenactment, and Jugger ( Big geek points if you know what I am talking about, uber-geek points If you saw it in the theater http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094764/ ) We manage to create a place where the romance and Ideals of a bygone age can flourish. Where people can be inspired to be something more than themselves, Valhalla made manifest, and to paraphrase the Bard, where no man is ne’er so vile that he cannot be gentled and called my brother. In the SCA we tend to make our fantasies a little more concrete than most.

RUFUSSS!!!

School is out for now. I’ll be back in two weeks. Over the last semester I have had the time to do nothing but study. It seems as if it has been forever since I posted anything here. I would like to say something witty, or at least indulge in some good old fashioned ranting but I just don’t have the heart right now. Yesterday one of my heroes died. George Carlin was only 71. In the grand scheme of things, that’s really not that old. When I think of my earliest memory of a comedian I think of him sitting on that stool on with that puckish smirk.

George, more than any other person, taught me to think. He taught me to question everything. He taught me that my stuff was my stuff, other peoples shit was their shit, and through extension my stuff was just shit too. The man was deep. To say he was a comedian is true, but I think he was a philosopher first. Like the big D, a philosopher who used humor to teach us, and ease the horror of the human condition. He was a living expression of the Buddha’s teachings made manifest through a lower Manhattan accent. If I ever saw a real Zen master in action it was him. Understand that I did not agree with most of his politics. He stood way too far to the left for me. Understand that none of that matters. His was a voice that should have endured. There are very few like him left, if any.

Many people will post his seven dirty words bit. I refuse to do so. I want him to be remembered as the Iconoclast that he was, not for some poke at the FCC.

I wonder what his last words were. Good night Rufus. Remember the rules of the road. You will be missed more than you will ever know

I cut this from

http://www.georgecarlin.com/home/home.html

I think it sums it up rather well

I figured out years ago that the human species is totally fucked and has been for a long time. I also know that the sick, media-consumer culture in America continues to make this so-called problem worse. But the trick, folks, is not to give a fuck. Like me. I really don't care. I stopped worrying about all this temporal bullshit a long time ago. It's meaningless.

Stupid Monkey.......

I was watching Robot Chicken the other night when my lady love brought up how disgusting\disturbing she thought the show was with all of the violence and whatnot. [Shakes head …I think I was just channeling Dr. Christopher Turk for a second there]

Today I asked her how that show was different from the cartoons we grew up watching. Wily E. Coyote suffered far worse at the hands of his own ineptitude, and the high manufacturing and quality control standards of the (obviously based in China) ACME corporation. Tom Cat was cut up and lacerated in far more ways than the most diabolical sushi chef could have ever imagined; not too mention suffering through levels of blunt force trauma that would make the boys that play with the supercollider envious. Do we even have to bring up the indignities that Elmer J. Fudd suffered at the hands, errr…I mean to say paws, of our favorite cross dressing member of the Leporidae family. Her response to my query was “I don’t know…. It’s just different” I of course respect her opinion but have a hard time seeing why she feels that way. Granted, the gore is a bit more pronounced on R.C. but I think red play dough looks just like red play dough, even when it is squirting out of a Rocky Balboa action figure’s eye socket. I, in many ways, find this much more cartoonish than a shotgun blast to a ducks face or Tom getting his tail stuck in the chop-o-matic. In the cartoon the gore is self and medium consistent, and therefore more realistic. Whereas the stop action animated play dough gore just looks silly ”bleeding” out of a plastic toy. To me it’s more reminiscent of when Stretch Armstrong sprung a leak, than of various viscera.

As I sit here typing, the thought occurs to me that in the case of R.C., it may just be that I am male and she is female, and as children we played with our toys in drastically different ways. I realize that the things that the characters on R.C. do to each other,albeit with significantly more sarcasm and cynicism, are the same things that little boys have been imagining when they are playing with their action figures since before G.I. Joe was in basic training. I have watched a friend’s granddaughter play with her dolls (yes, boys have action figures, girls have dolls) and I don’t recall ever hearing Dora scream out in pain because Thomas the tank engine ran over her at the behest of the Dark Lord of the Sith. In point of fact I think the train said “excuses me please” on that particular afternoon, and as I recollect, Darth Vader was no where to be seen. I do on the other hand, remember my friends and me conceiving, and acting out things with our star wars figures that would have made Torquemada wince, then give full points for style and originality. Nothing can surpass little boys sheer capacity for creative fiendishness; to quote a certain excessively rotund, dead, movie icon “The horror, the horror…”
(Big lit nerd points if you can remember who originally made that pronouncement and in what book. Don't cheat and Google it ya' filthy heathen) Maybe this is the appeal of R.C. it’s like playing with our toys allover again, except this time the production values are slightly higher.

So what’s your take on the issue?

...and I believe I'll have another beer

Why do you believe what you believe? We all believe things, but very few of us really take the time to question the why of our beliefs. Why might you believe or for that matter, not believe in God? Why do you believe in right of the government to impose laws? Why do you believe that one fast food establishment is better than another? Why do you believe in anything at all?

De-constructing our personal belief structure can be one of the most brutal things we do to our selves .It can be ego shattering. We often find that what we “believe” is nothing more than brainwashing. Granted, the scrub job was often done by well meaning people, (our parents, teachers whomever) but the end result is the same; a brain filled with codes and general purpose sub-routines that we follow without ever wondering just why.

I think each person has the duty to themselves to pull apart the very fabric of their beliefs and see what lies beneath. Find out why. Question everything. Then and only then can you truly understand who you are and really begin to think for your self. It can be a scary thing, and if you find out that in the end you are really just nothing, its o.k. You can start over. Like that movie guy said “you can’t fill a full cup”.

Time is an illusion, lunch time ...doubly so

Current thoughts,

The perception of time is simply an expression of relativity. When we were young, the seconds would stretch on for what would seem to be an eternity. At some point, that changes, and the years go by in the blink of an eye. Einstein knew this, when he figured out the relationship between time and light. The Buddhists knew this when they realized each moment was the same as the next; and Michael Valentine Smith said it best, “Waiting is”. In our minds, some things are as fresh as they were scores of years ago. A first kiss, a first car, yet we can’t remember what we had for lunch today. I have six or so weeks left to go in this semester. It is both and eternity and a breath. Before I know it, I will be sitting in a chair taking the proctored exam for the CCNA. Before we know it, it will be us lying on our death beds wondering if it was all worth it, whatever “it” was. I just hope that when I get there, I will be able to say yes. Each scar is a merit badge. Each pain is a short hand note for a longer story.

What this really boils down to for me is that I need to get off my ass and get working on that book that I have been thinking about.

Dog noses,

A few weeks have passed and all is well. School is better, except for a few frustrating problems that nothing can be done about. I just have to accept them. I’ve been to a few SCA events, visited my mother, my brother, and his wife. I have broken rattan, lost a glove and half gauntlet, questioned my sanity, played with my dogs, read “Preacher” (possibly one of the best comic books I have read since “the dark knight returns”) and really, just tried to avoid thinking about the upcoming election as much as possible. It seems that any one, with any shred of hope of pulling America’s head out of its ass, has been, or is going to be, chewed up and spat out by our political process. In the end it will be the same as it ever was. Some wise person once said, “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve, not the government they want.” I say “Jesus Christ, who did we piss off? What did we do to deserve this?” R.A.H. was right when he called this time the “crazy years”.

I am finding a fantastic sort of beauty in network that spans our globe. The more I learn about it the more I am amazed and awed. We are rebuilding the tower of Babel. This time the mortar is tcp\ip and the bricks are binary code. Globalization is now inevitable. Communication is instant and knowledge is viral. When we (the Reagan youth {extra props if you recall the band}) were children, it was a big deal to call some one in a different area code. Friends, only slightly older than I, recall party lines. The phone was for important things only; and computers were something that the average home could not afford, much less use. Now, it’s nothing for me to get on line with a machine that fits in my lap and has more processor power than what put man on the moon, and speak with some one on a different continent. In 1980, Michael Crichton published “Congo” In the story the characters used computers that could fit in the palm of their hands. I recall a High school cafeteria conversation that a friend, L.M., and I had where we debated the possibility of such wondrous devices. Here I sit 20 some odd years later, composing this on a machine not much larger than the trapper keeper (because I just had to have the 17 inch laptop) I had at my side that day. The phone in my pocket has as much power if not more than the devices in that book. I can only begin to think of where we might be in another 20 years if we don’t kill our selves first. Just a few weeks ago they took a dead chicken heart and turned it into a beating one. How long before I can upload my self to the net. Remember, death is really just an engineering problem.

Back to school

I’m back in school. Cisco. What more can be said? I will now proceed to bang my head against the wall until, either, my brains fall out and land with a satisfying, plate full of spaghetti splat, and they put me in a nice little box, or until my blood drips to the ground in a nice, hierarchical ,orderly, meticulously numbered and documented pattern.

While I understand the need to learn how to do sub-netting by hand, I also know that if I want to drive a nail, I use a hammer that I bought at my favorite slice of retail hell, not fire up the forge and make one from scratch. Likewise, if I want to create 500 hosts within a class B network, I am not going to sit down with paper and pen and get to cipherin’ like Jethro Bodine. Instead, I, like any other higher mammal, will reach for my trusty subnet calculator and have every thing done in a timely manner. As the wise man said “time is money”. Ah ha!! Screams the naysayer, “What if you have no sub-net calculator”?(ever notice this argument never applies to hamburgers? “but what if you have no grocery store …..” ) Well to them I say, “ If you have no access to a sub-net calculator, you have much bigger problems to worry about” ( For some reason I just pictured this conversation being held in a Victorian drawing room by those two Guinness beer guys. Brilliant!!)

All this anger is really just the result of me being very frustrated. When I left class today I was sure I had this cold. Much to my surprise I did not. When I sat down to do my homework, the part of my brain responsible for sub-netting decided to have an aneurism. I wonder if all that carousing I did in the Army is coming back to haunt me? After several hours of research on the net, all I accomplished was the consumption of one rather large plate of pasta and shrimp, a blinding headache, and not one damn problem solved. I hope I can get my head straightened out tomorrow. I know I can do this.

On the plus side of things, I was at least able to help my mother with her P.C. problems over the phone.

I wanted the first post in this new blog to be something rather profound; a new blog, a new year, and all that. As it turns out, it’s just like the byline….. a pile of fetid dingo’s kidneys.

Until later.